


sepelio

by TheBigCat



Category: Bernice Summerfield (Books & Audio), Doctor Who & Related Fandoms
Genre: Blood and Gore, Body Horror, Bugs & Insects, Cannibalism, Claustrophobia, Dellah-era, Friendship, Gen, Hallucinations, Hannibal AU, Hannibal-Typical Gore, Heavy-handed metaphors, Literary Allusions, Murder Investigations, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Psychological Drama, Unfortunate Life Choices, Unreliable Narrator, a wild attempt to reconcile the brax-hannibal similarities, pseudo-cannibalism, without losing any of brax's characterization
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-17
Updated: 2021-01-25
Packaged: 2021-03-04 01:54:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 59,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24765742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheBigCat/pseuds/TheBigCat
Summary: A seemingly endless trail of murders and murderers springing up all across Dellah. An insatiable, inexplicable morbid curiosity. An abundance of cold, hungry earth. Ignorance is bliss, as long as you can maintain it.Sometimes it doesn't matter how good your intentions are.
Relationships: Bernice Summerfield/Jason Kane (background), Irving Braxiatel & Bernice Summerfield
Comments: 51
Kudos: 39





	1. entrée

**Author's Note:**

> You can blame ivq and ikolism for enabling me into writing this. 
> 
> Please a) mind those tags. this is a hannibal au/fusion thing so obviously it's not going to be fun hijinks and fluffy friendship b) be aware that i simultaneously have no idea what i'm doing and know EXACTLY what i'm doing. this will be blatantly and unapologetically pretentious, gruesomely bizarre, and above all else, _extremely_ slow to update because apparently writing a single chapter of this took like a month of work when i expected it to be a week, tops. and c), (hopefully) enjoy.

*

says butterfly to beast – _my friend, we both can cause calamities  
our impact on the world’s the same, our sizes just formalities  
_says beast – _it’s true enough, but see, the devil’s in the details  
you flap without a care and never think of what your act entails  
  
_with butterfly’s chaos and beast’s cold destruction  
the death of their world is a grim co-production

*

The lecture is... a lecture. Definitely not one of Benny’s best. Most certainly not one of her worst. It’s in the grey sort of in-between area where the hall isn’t full enough and not attentive enough for her to be giving her full enthusiasm to the topic she’s talking about – landscape theory as related to asteroid tombs – but where she does care about it enough to not just end the class for the day an hour and a half early.

She’s midway into discussing the finer points of the theory when there’s a knock at the door, and when talking about this in retrospect Bernice will probably say that this was the point where she felt a sense of sudden and impending doom, but that’s a complete lie. At the time, she feels nothing at all apart from faint curiosity.

“Professor Summerfield?” says the man at the door. His face says nothing about him. His uniform and earpiece say quite a lot of things, ‘ _Dellah law enforcement_ ’ included. Benny resists the urge to groan out loud. Nothing good can come of this.

“Well, class is dismissed early today,” she says to her students with an air of resignation. “If I’m arrested for horrible crimes that I probably haven’t committed... I’m sure Braxiatel will take you lot for a week or two, he owes me. And also tell them I didn’t do whatever it is. Just for the record. Because I didn’t.” She waves a hand at them. “Okay, that’s it; get out of here.”

They do, and the law enforcement officer comes up to join her at the lecturer’s podium as she tidies away her scattered notes and tries to get everything into some semblance of order for whoever’s got to use this lecture hall after her. “All right, out with it – what have I done this time?”

“Nothing whatsoever,” he says with a sort of air of detached amusement, although his expression remains completely professional. “There’s a matter I was hoping to discuss with you – ”

According to him, this morning they received a tip from an anonymous source about the discovery of a body on the St Oscar’s campus. Murder, apparently,

“Oh,” says Benny, “oh, brilliant, so I wasn’t wrong about the ‘horrible crimes’ bit. Why do you need me?”

“We were hoping that you might be available to consult,” says the officer. “You’d be fairly compensated for your time and effort – there’s several aspects to it that we believe you’d be able to shed some light on.”

*

Benny says yes, of course, because saying no to a request like that just isn’t the sort of thing she does. One short trip later and she’s standing outside the mortuary. She hadn’t even been aware there _was_ a mortuary on Dellah, but in retrospect it does make some amount of sense.

Disposable medi-gloves have been thoughtfully provided. She slips them on, then goes into the room.

It’s a sobering sight. Benny actually has to stop and take a few deep breaths. No matter how many dead bodies she sees, no matter how mutilated or bent or miserable they appear, she hasn’t stopped feeling that twist of sadness in her chest at the sight of them. She hopes that never changes; doesn’t know what will become of her once it does.

“More murder?” says a smooth, quietly amused voice from across the room, by the door.

“Apparently,” Benny says. Stops. Processes the fact that there’s someone else here, now. Frowns. Looks up. “Ah. Hello, you.”

Irving Braxiatel, in the flesh. Angular features and dark intelligent eyes and a perfectly tailored suit, because he never seems to be without one of them, in any of those muted fashionable color schemes that he seems to pride himself on. She wonders briefly who his tailor is and if they live on Dellah. No, probably not, she dismisses almost instantly, because it’s far more likely that they live in the far-flung future or distant past or in the present, but light years away and on a world beyond comprehension.

She then wonders if he’d be willing to hook _her_ up with a suit or two, because she has the distinct impression that she’d be able to pull it off rather fabulously. Then she abruptly remembers that she’s in a morgue and there is, in fact, a body. Fashion tips will have to wait.

“And what might you be doing here on this fine morning, in the middle of an empty morgue?” she asks with a raised eyebrow and a quizzical look.

“Much the same as you, I suspect,” he says dryly. “Consultation. Although...” He _hmm_ s lightly. “This really does seem more your area than mine. I haven’t the faintest clue why they would need my... ah, particular brand of expertise.”

He comes to stand besides her. Once again, she is reminded of the fact that Brax could probably use her head as an armrest if he wanted to. He most likely wouldn’t, because doing so would be completely undignified and god forbid Irving Braxiatel be anything but perfectly composed at all times, but the option is definitely there for him. What she wouldn’t give to be just a bit taller.

Together, they survey the body – the dirt it had been covered in neatly cleared away by law enforcement hours ago. The arms are still neatly folded over the chest. The strange bruises and blisters all over the hands, but nowhere else. The mouth half-open, revealing the telltale shiny glint of a coin. Human, or humanoid at the very least, but the methodology is unmistakable.

“Martian funeral rites,” says Brax, and sighs. “Most definitely your territory.”

“Not usually the sort of thing you perform on a human, though,” Benny points out. “I’d even go as far to say that most Ice Warriors would be flat-out disgusted at even the _idea_ of it.”

“Saurians do not typically bury their dead,” Brax says. “And certainly not in any sort of Terran earth, with nothing even resembling a burial chamber or coffin.”

“Mm.” Benny takes a step back, peels off the plastic medi-gloves, and rakes her fingers roughly through her messy hair. It’s been dishevelled all day and is only getting worse the later the hour gets. She is in desperate need of a hairbrush, and also a nap. She fumbles for her satchel, and the copy of the notes she’d been given on this case. “This is... his name’s Zachary McCarthy. Human-hybrid, late forties, runs – sorry, _ran_ – a bar down in lower town. I think I’ve even been there.”

“Not surprising,” he says lightly.

“Yes, I’m a raging alcoholic who’s charted ever bar on the planet and then some. Let’s put a pin in that and maybe confront my issues when we _don’t_ have a body in front of us.” Benny flips through pages in the case file. “Nice bloke, by all accounts. Didn’t have anything like this coming, according to... literally anyone you’d care to ask. He ran student housing above the bar, for criminally low fees.”

“No connection to Martians or Martian funerals, I take it?”

“None at all.” Benny frowns down at the page. “I don’t know what they expect us to find here, but... we can give it our best shot, I suppose.”

“That’s all we can ever hope to do,” he agrees.

They leave the morgue to go to a spare, empty conference room. For the next few hours, they go over the files, and compile a report together with mutual grumbling and commiserating over bureaucratic procedure, and send it off, but ultimately they don’t find anything of use.

“Well, that was a useless waste of a day,” yawns Benny as she walks with Braxiatel to the entrance of the university. “Let’s be honest; whoever did the whole Martian burial murder is probably long gone by now.”

A noncommittal sort of _mm_ from Brax, and then, “You really think that’s the case?”

“Well, I know _I_ wouldn’t stick around if I’d done something like that,” Benny says. “Like I said in the report – best thing they can do to catch whoever-it-was is check the lists of people shuttling off-planet for someone who fits the vague demographic of ‘psychotic archaeology killer. I’m telling you, long gone.”

“Unless they had something else to accomplish here on Dellah,” Brax points out.

“Like more murder?” Benny says, laughing, and then sobers slightly. “I hope not.”

“So do I, but it’s always a possibility,” Brax says, and then, as they reach the gates, “ah, here we are – this is where we part ways, I think. Good night, Bernice. Pleasant dreams,” he adds, with a hint of sardonicism.

“I’m sure my dreams will be delightful, and this will have no lasting psychological damage whatsoever,” Benny sighs, and waves him off.

*

_, the earth, it hungers;_

*

The next day, there’s another anonymous tip and another unearthed body. And another case of Dellah law enforcement completely and utterly failing to do their damn job, because they’re called in to consult once more. Benny’s regretting her flippant remarks from last night, because it’s also somewhat of a grim realization for her that they most certainly have a serial killer on their hands. This one had been buried, somewhat shallowly, as well. There’s the strange blisters and bruises all over the hands.

The only thing that’s different is the lack of coin in the mouth. There’s no coin here. Instead, the skin of the poor young woman’s corpse has been slashed, very carefully. Criss-crosses all over the arms and stomach, careful tessellating X-marks running all the way down to the thighs. All done post-death, apparently.

“Niv'ellian funeral rites,” Braxiatel says. His brow is slightly creased, just _slightly._ “Laceration of the body to release the soul back into the communal consciousness.”

“Not the sort of thing you usually see being performed on humans, I take it,” Benny says.

“No, it’s a very species-specific ritual.”

The grime and dirt all over the girl has soaked into her many wounds. And there’s something vaguely familiar about her face, but when Benny checks the name and background, nothing rings a bell.

Benny cancels her evening lecture, and spends another frustrating night trying to puzzle things out with Brax. It’s ridiculous, because it’s not even her problem to deal with and she could easily just walk away at any time, but... no. It’s grimly fascinating and she’s _invested_ and she wants to see this through to the end even though she knows that realistically there may be no end in sight.

*

Over the course of the next week, three new bodies are discovered. The rituals seem to be drawn from a seemingly random variety of death rituals from across the universe – Ogri, Usurian, late-sixth-dynasty Sontaran. All buried, all discovered from anonymous tips that can’t seem to be tracked or traced, no matter how hard anyone tries. And all with those same wounds on the hands. There’s seemingly no pattern to who they are or where they’re buried. All camera footage seems to die or corrupt at any time or place it would be useful to track them. It’s like they’re chasing a ghost.

The sixth body is what changes everything.

“Why are we even here?” Benny says, as they stand over the body of a fractured, broken man, recently unearthed. A hint of horrified anger bubbles up in her. “I _know_ I have a reputation for getting involved in gruesome murders and unlikely events, and I guess you have a reputation for... ah...” She hesitates, unsure. The Collection hasn’t happened yet for him, and although _trouble_ steadfastly remains his honorary middle name, she’s not entirely sure if that actually applies here.

“Getting involved in gruesome murders and unlikely events that you’ve already got yourself embroiled in?” Brax suggests.

Relieved, she nods. “Exactly. But it’s almost like everyone who’d _usually_ be investigating this sort of thing has buggered off completely, leaving the two of us in charge.”

“Yes.” Brax’s gaze drifts across the empty morgue, flitting over the rows of shiny chrome cabinets. “I’ll have to speak with someone about this. If nothing else, we should be getting compensated properly for all this trouble.”

“I’d rather we just stopped looking at bodies,” says Benny, but looks at the one in front of her anyway. She tries not to gag. It’s definitely messier and bloodier than any of the other ones, but there’s something else there. She can’t quite put her finger on it... “Who is this?”

“Corbenton Tizz – an Argolin. Serial arsonist,” Brax says, without even having to consult the files or notes. His hands are tucked neatly behind his back, and he reviews the body with a dispassionate glance.

“...I remember him, actually,” realizes Benny, going to run a hand through her hair and just barely managing to stop herself when she remembers she’s wearing gloves. “Tried to burn down the music department a few weeks ago, because of... some petty sort of squabble with his girlfriend?”

“And the fine arts building the month before that,” Brax says. “A sequel, of sorts, to his previous attempts to set the theatre department, psychology, journalism, and administrations buildings alight.”

Benny considers this. Recalls the many, many, extremely annoying fire alarms and fire drills over the last year. Looks at the body with its sides carved up like roast beef and eyes plucked out. “If this is about _that,_ it seems disproportionate. And... not quite right, somehow. Where did the hand wounds go?”

“Mm,” says Brax noncommittally, and this time he does look down to check the file. “They caught him just last week; he was set to be transferred off-world, but he vanished from containment last night and...” A wordless little gesture to the tableau in front of them.

“Turned up buried in the middle of a half-abandoned construction site,” Benny finishes. “You know, I don’t think this is the same killer.”

“Oh?”

“It’s a similar M.O., but... no. There’s something off about it. I think we’ve got a copycat.” She grimaces. “Okay, this place is making me _ridiculously_ uneasy. We’ve seen the body, let’s get out of here.”

And they do.

“It’s strange,” says Benny, as they’re walking out to the main street, “because, the marks on their hands... they’ve been consistent with every one of them up to now – ” She finally makes the connection, and stops dead in her tracks. “Oh. No. Oh, dear Goddess, _no._ Okay.”

“Benny?” Brax stops as well, looking up from his datapad. “Is everything all right?”

“He’s making them dig their own graves,” she says. “It... it fits. The variation in grave depth, it’s because not all of them were strong enough to dig to the full classic six-feet-under. The wounds on the hand, they’re shovel blisters. This one didn’t have the hand-markings because the copycat didn’t make them dig – they just pushed him into a pre-existing one.” She grinds the heels of her palms into her eyes, horrified and frustrated. “I can’t believe I didn’t see that until now. I can’t believe _nobody_ noticed this until now. What’s wrong with law enforcement on this planet?”

“I’m sure they would’ve got there eventually,” Brax says solicitously.

“Forget law enforcement, what’s wrong with _me?_ ” Benny shakes her head. “I couldn’t see it, I had to have a murderer point it out for me through _another_ gruesome crime scene.”

“Point it out?” Brax says. Playing the companion. Asking the obvious questions. He can be a really good sport like that sometimes. She’s sure he’s going to complain about it incessantly later, though. Well, she’ll take what she can get.

“It’s like they had to show me a negative so I could see the positive,” she tries to explain, and then just sighs. “I don’t know, it was like that whole thing was... gift-wrapped for us. A poke in the right direction.”

“A murderer trying to help catch a murderer,” says Brax. “How very novel.”

“I’m glad you think so, because all _I_ can currently think about is how we’ve apparently got _two_ psychopathic killers running around the planet, shelling out justice or hints or whatever they think they’re doing.” She grimaces. “Let’s just focus on the first one, though, the original. He’s probably the most dangerous.”

“Danger is relative,” says Brax. “Would you say that the killer who kills with reckless artistic abandon is the more dangerous of the two? Or the killer who kills with precise, uncanny knowledge of how his killings will affect the world around him?”

“I think the artistic one will kill _more,_ ” replies Benny. “Which makes him the one we need to set our sights on. Hopefully the precision-strike guy will keep his serrated knife in check until we have our hands free to get at him.”

“I’ll call him up tonight, let him know he should put tomorrow’s elaborately planned gruesome murder on hold,” Brax says with a nod.

“I’d appreciate it,” says Benny, giving herself over to morbid, slightly inappropriate humour. And then sighs. “I need this to be over and done with, I need a full class of attentive students who don’t keep disappearing on me, and I need a _drink_.”

“I don’t know about ending this, and I don’t know about your class,” Brax says. “But I can certainly arrange for _one_ of those things.”

*

It’s getting late, _excruciatingly_ late, so they head back to his office. Brax pours the wine and they drink a sardonic, irreverent toast to ongoing murder investigations, long may they last. And then they drink, and drink some more It’s very, _very_ good wine. Too good to be wasting on her, most definitely, but if he’s not complaining, she’s certainly not going to point it out.

Everyone needs a friend like Brax, honestly. Someone who’s willing to share ridiculously expensive alcohol in the dead of night with their fellow colleagues because the situation just calls for it. The whole serial-killer thing is getting to her, and she has a feeling it’s getting to him too. Not that he’d ever admit it.

Time Lords generally can’t get drunk off alcohol the way humans do, but either Brax has slipped some ginger into his drink, or he’s letting his guard down because she herself is ridiculously tispy at this point. Either way, an hour into this and his jacket is off and his shirtsleeves are actually rolled up, and he’s leaning back in his chair in something that just might be possibly considered _lounging._

They’re no longer talking about buried, bloated corpses and cannibals and the heavy, strange weight of being the ones that have to deal with these strangest of circumstances. They haven’t been talking about that for a long time, now. They’re talking about – what are they talking about, again?

“Fucking – _Orpheus,_ ” Benny spits with conviction, gesticulating wildly with her mostly-empty wine glass. “Goddamn fool, idiot – what a moron. What a complete _imbecile._ ”

Oh, right. That. (She can’t quite remember how they got to the topic of old-old-Earth mythology, but it probably seemed very important and reasonable at the time. She’ll try to piece together the sequence of events later, if she remembers to.)

“Not that I don’t agree with you,” Brax says, and he’s actually got his feet propped up on his desk, how about that? When had that happened? And how is he still managing to look infuriatingly dignified despite that? “But I really must ask – what especially do you find so imbecilic about _this_ particular tragic Greek protagonist? That oeuvre of mythology has quite the range of them to choose from.”

“Fucking – all right, listen,” Benny says, trying to shake the fuzz from her head, and failing miserably. “Tale as old as time. Man’s wife dies in tragic snake-related accident, check – “

“Check,” he agrees, solemn as anything.

“Good ol’ Orpheus picks up his lyre, goes trotting off down into hell to get her back – why ‘m I recapping all this, _Goddess_ I’m drunk, what am I even say – saying, _hmm,_ okay. He goes and plays his, bloody,” she mimes strumming a guitar or lyre or something, “pretty music thing. You’re... you’re fancy. You know the opera, probably.”

He hums a distant, sad-sounding snatch of music, which she takes to mean _yes_ and also _I’m showing off now._

“Hades goes _sure thing Orpheus, that was a real pretty song so off you pop with your wife_ but then he’s all, _but wait! There’s more!_ , and – ” There is wine in her glass that she hadn’t noticed. She makes a particularly furious gesture. It goes slopping across the carpet, “and – whoops, sorry ‘bout that – why am I even explaining this to you, you know all of this – ”

“Not to worry, this office has had far worse.”

“ – I’m on too much of a roll to stop. Hades says, _if you look back you lose her,_ Orpheus goes _fine,_ and then he immediately looks back the moment he’s even _slightly_ scared she isn’t right behind him anymore. Her – I can’t even remember her name, Eurie – Eury-something.”

“Eurydice,” Brax suggests.

“That’s the bitch!” she exclaims a bit too loudly, slamming her fist down on the desk. “Ow,” she says, and then slumps back angrily into her chair. “I just – just wouldn’t have looked back,” she mutters at the desk. “Moron. Idiot. What did it even _accomplish_ for him, the neurotic bastard _–_ ”

“I think you’ll find that Orpheus’s inadvisable life choices _are_ rather the point of the entire legend,” Brax says. “It’s set up to be a tragedy from the very beginning. And what’s a tragedy without an unhappy ending?”

“Hrrng,” Benny says eloquently, and downs the rest of her wine. It’s starting to lose its distinctiveness in her mouth. All she can taste is bitter, fruity tartness – numbing her lips, her throat. It’s nice, in a _I can’t feel my tongue_ sort of way. “‘M starting to get sick of tragedies, t’be honest.”

“Orpheus starts to think his wife might not, in fact, be following in his wake,” Braxiatel says. Quiet, measured. He’s got a very good storytelling voice, she should let him know that sometime. Maybe she can get him to read her some of those boring-as-all-hell academic papers she’s been meaning to get around it, it might liven them up. Is that a weird thing to request? She’s not sure. What’s he talking about again. “He knows that looking back, should she be there, is as good as a death sentence to her. So what are his options?”

Benny lifts a hand and points at him, not bothering to raise her head from where it’s fallen to her chest. “That’s – yes. Exactly, you’ve... exactly. That’s it. The options. If he looks back, he loses. Doesn’t matter if she’s even, even... there, anyway. Looking inside Sch – Schro – fuck.”

“Schrodinger’s box,” Brax says. He makes it sound remarkably non-condescending. Which she appreciates that.

“That. Yes. Dead either way. Or, _or,_ he keeps on – keeps on going anyway, makes it up to the surface, and if it turns out she really is there, _good for him,_ but if she’s dead, well it was going to be like this either way, so what can you do?”

“Push on, don’t look back,” Brax murmurs, and she sees him slowly raise his glass to toast the ceiling from out of the corner of her eye. Weird thing to do. Maybe he’s more drunk than she’d thought.

“Don’t make this into a deep thing,” she tells him, as sternly as she can. “‘M absolutely sloshed. Wasted. This isn’t meaningful, I just, I really... Orpheus _annoys_ me. No metaphors here.”

Her eyes slip closed and the last thing she hears is him chuckling dryly and saying, “I wouldn’t dream of doing anything of the sort,” and then there’s something soft and heavy being tucked around her and she’s gone.

*

_a feast a tribute a sacrifice, for we are hungry and we must feed; a knife a kiss another one for the slaughter, for we were friends once but certain prices must always be paid – pay in blood or pay in bone or pay in tears but pay as quick as you can for you suffer from a chronic case of no time left and my darling i’m afraid it’s terminal_

_a shovel a grave a grimness to all you do, for you are nothing to us and you know it; take up the task and take up your time and commit them all to the endless earth, for only through this will you ever be free. put on your little shows and perform your quaint rituals if you wish, they are nothing to us. only what you hope will be the faintest memory of a fraction of your peace of mind, stolen from the peace of dozens of dozens of other worlds_

_crown of ivory crown of thorns crown of sorrow; this is what you have wrought to stop us_

_will it ever be worth it_

*

Eyes open suddenly. A groan. Bernice Summerfield is hungover and is aware that it’s far too early to be awake, but there’s something she has to do, _what is it,_ what’s going _on –_

She’s in Brax’s office with a soft, dark quilt draped loosely around her. Her neck is extremely sore, but she’s been sleeping upright in her chair so... understandable, really. It’s morning, very early morning, and she can tell _that_ by the dim, thready light creeping through the window and pooling on Brax’s back. Because he’s asleep at his desk, head cradled in his arms. This is enough of a strange sight to give her pause for a moment or two, because... _huh._ Brax, asleep? What universe is this?

But then her brain comes online enough that she realizes there’s probably more important things she should be wondering about.

She’s awake, she thinks. Why is she awake? It doesn’t seem likely that she woke for no reason. There’s no noise, the light hasn’t reached her face, the office is quiet and undisturbed. Calm restfulness hangs over the everything of it like a light, pleasant shroud.

She can’t remember what they’d been talking about last night. Can’t remember much of anything past the second glass of wine, and good grief, she thought she could hold her liquor better than that. She tries to recall her dreams, but can only conjure up the faintest recollection of the smell of wet soil and the lightning scent of ozone right before a storm.

She stares at the thin strip of light determinedly creeping closer and closer to her and thinks absently that she’s come to a realization. Some sort of extremely important realization that she needs to follow up on immediately.

And then it strikes her, so suddenly and overwhelmingly that she just sits there for a minute, eyes wide. Oh. _Oh,_ of course.

She’s mid-motion to shaking Brax’s shoulder when she hesitates. He looks... ridiculously peaceful. She doesn’t think he gets all that much sleep, all things considered. It must run in the family. And it’s not like she needs him for this, anyway. She’s faced much worse than a crazed serial killer with inscrutable issues without backup, and look – here she is, still alive and kicking, and absolutely ready to make more poor life choice at the drop of a hat.

She scribbles out the quickest of explanations on a spare sheet of notepaper, and slides it carefully under his nose, where she figures he’ll see it first, and then clumsily swipes her jacket off the back of her chair, pulling it on.

Benny slips out of the office door, closing it quietly behind her with a faint _click_ , and then she’s off through the hallways of the university. The lights are off, which is fine, because the morning light is more than enough to see by. She doesn’t pass a single person the entire way, probably because they’re all asleep like regular, well-adjusted people.

She unlocks the back entrance from the inside, and then she’s off, heading across the stone-paved St Oscar’s campus with purpose. The morning air does quite a lot to clear the headache and the hangover and the _everything_ from last night. She still feels like shit, but at least it’s a focused, purposeful kind of shit. She knows what the killer’s name is and what he looks like, and – most importantly, she knows exactly where to find him.

The Sable Sun is in the lower town, small and nondescript as far as bars go. What makes it important is this: the owner of it had been the very first victim in this string of horribly macabre incidents. Further important fact: the rooms right above the bar had been leased out to various Dellah residents. Mostly university students. She knows _this_ because one of her students lives there, and she knows _that_ because the student in question, Eddison Bright, had always stood out in her mind as having an overtly morbid obsession with Martian burial rituals.

The connections are obvious, and so is the conclusion.

Maybe he’s not the killer. There’s always a chance that this is just a strange coincidence. But either way, she want to talk to Eddison. Wants to see what he’s got to say for himself.

Benny knows where to go. She’s been there before. Only the once, because... well, it wasn’t actually a very good bar. But she’s not the sort of person who goes around forgetting the locations of bars or getting lost on a planet she’s lived on for months now, so it only takes her maybe fifteen minutes, tops, to get to where she needs to go.

The door is open, the bar is empty. Dusty countertops that haven’t been wiped for over a week, if not longer. The bottles lined up behind the bar have all been broken or stolen or emptied, and the lights aren’t on. The regular patrons of the Sable Sun apparently wasted no time whatsoever once they realized the owner was gone. Which leaves the question – what happened to the tenants upstairs?

“Hello?” she calls out into the faintly musty darkness. She is immediately regretting not bringing some sort of weapon along with her, but, well. Hindsight is twenty-twenty and all that. There’s no response.

This was a bad idea. She’s seriously considering leaving, but then there’s a rustle, a noise of someone moving and she swings around wildly, looking for its source. She can’t pinpoint it, but she notices the stairwell. Upstairs seems like a good enough place to start looking. Maybe the noise was just a rat. She makes for the stairwell, wishing she’d thought to bring at least a _flashlight,_ come on, what sort of archaeologist is she – 

And then she stops abruptly.

“Oh, bugger,” she says.

Bernice Summerfield is intimately familiar with the feeling of a laser rifle pressed to the small of her back. This is really quite depressing, now that she thinks about it, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Being familiar with it doesn’t mean that the cold chill of realization that creeps through her entire being isn’t just as terrifying, though.

_The bar counter, he was just behind the bar counter, how could I be so stupid,_ she’s thinking, and she wants to blame it on the hangover but she’s pretty sure that even if she’d been stone-cold sober she still wouldn’t have noticed him.

She doesn’t move, doesn’t breathe. Neither does he. There’s a moment or so where they’re locked in a silent, eye contact-less standoff.

“I take it I’m speaking to Dellah’s latest serial killer, then,” she says. Evenly, calmly. “Hello, Eddison.”

“Professor Summerfield.” His voice is higher than she remembers. Maybe he’s afraid. Maybe she’d just been mentally assigning a grizzly old killer voice to him and it’s throwing her off. “I didn’t want to kill you. Should’ve kept your nose out of this.”

“Story of my life,” she mutters, thinking about how this would’ve all gone down so very differently if she’d just woken Brax up and brought him along with her. Maybe he’d be the one at gunpoint, not her.

A firm jab to her back with the rifle. “You’re gonna start walking, and you’re not gonna yell or scream for help or _anything._ Is that clear?”

“Crystal clear,” she murmurs.

They start walking. Out the back door, into the alleyway, down the street. 

“I would like to know _why_ , though,” she says, careful to keep her voice casual, nonthreatening.

“Why what?”

She blinks, her face twisting into outright disbelief even though she knows he can’t see it. “Er – why the burial-themed murders? I... just don’t understand, to be perfectly honest. I get _how_ and maybe _sort of_ why you’re picking the people, but the actual reason you’re doing it? I’m completely stumped.”

It takes him nearly a full minute to respond.

“Have you ever seen something,” he says, “and, no, _seen_ isn’t the word, but – _realized,_ maybe, that something exists and that your entire existence, everything you’ve ever been, pales in comparison to it? And all you can do in response is just... give it what you can. Feed it and try to show it that _yes, you’re there,_ and hope that’s enough. Hope that what you’re doing is enough that it’s even _aware_ of you in some vague, distant way, even if everything that you’re sacrificing to it doesn’t even feed it in the slightest?”

“No,” says Benny. Goosebumps are rising on her skin, and it’s not because of the cold morning air. “No, I can’t say I have. Is... that what you were doing to all those people? Feeding them to whatever this was? Your landlord, your ex-girlfriend, your study partner... all sacrifices? _Why?_ ”

“I didn’t know what sort of god it was,” he says. “Wasn’t sure what sort of ritual I needed to do to make it happy. So I tried them all, and nothing changed but... now, _now_ I think I have it. I think I know what I need to do.”

“I think you’re insane,” says Benny simply.

He grunts, and pokes her in the back again. “Keep walking,” is all he says, and he refuses to talk again.

*

They walk for what feels like forever but is probably closer to half an hour. Through the back streets of the city, out into the more uninhabited hills beyond. Benny is mildly surprised they don’t bump into anyone, but then again – early morning, and nobody _ever_ goes out east from the city. There’s nothing to find there, and she knows that for a fact.

Eddison gestures for her to stop when they’ve gone far enough that the city’s not visible and the faint wavering line of the planet-wide ocean can be seen in the far distance. He doesn’t say a word as she eyes him up with some trepidation – just pushes a shovel that he’s apparently been carrying all this time into Benny’s hands. She stares down at it with a blank sort of incomprehension. She’s used to smaller, more precise digging instruments, she thinks, somewhat absurdly, before she remembers. Bruises and blisters on the hands. Digging their own graves. They’re out in a field in the middle of nowhere, as far away from Dellah’s main city as you can get, and he’s holding a gun on her.

_Oh, Goddess._

“What were you thinking for me, then?” she says, airy and cheerful in the face of her own imminent demise. Because of course she is. Because it’s the only thing she has left. “Corvidian? Killoran? Martian, again? Because if I get any input, I’ve been thinking actually, maybe a good old-fashioned Viking funeral’s the way to go – I mean, we’re right next to the ocean, all we really need’s a boat. And a matchbox. Send me off to Valhalla in flames – I feel like I deserve it at this point.”

“No ritual. Just start digging,” he says, apparently not in the mood for her particular brand of irreverent bullshittery-in-the-face-of-danger, and gestures right at her feet with the gun. His voice doesn’t even shake. There’s no remorse in his eyes. She looks at him in the dim morning light and he looks just like he always has, sitting in the back of her lectures. Incongruous, casually eager to learn. He’s almost boyishly handsome. He has killed and buried at least five people, if not more, and she is about to be the next.

“Or what? You’ll shoot me in the back?” she says. “You’re going to kill me either way, you know. If you shoot me now, I’ll be dead and you’ll have to dig this grave all by yourself. If I’m going to die, I might as well inconvenience you in the pettiest damn way possible. You know what? I don’t think I _will._ ”

“I’m not going to kill you,” he says. “At least not right away. Not if you shut up, anyway. _Dig_.”

Getting shot is a painful way to go. She’ll bleed out slowly, most likely. If she listens to what he’s saying, she might end up having a chance to overpower him. Maybe she can bonk him over the head with the shovel while his back is turned.

She takes a deep, deep breath in through her nose. Pitches the end of the shovel into the dewy, loamy earth.

Begins to dig.

The ground is soft but it’s still excruciatingly slow work. Digging is _always_ slow – she knows this as an archaeologist – and she’s digging a _grave._ It takes an hour for her to make a knee-deep dent in the earth and by then the sun is creeping over the horizon and she’s panting and sweating. Eddison still has his gun trained firmly on her, and she hasn’t seen him blink once. There’s no openings, no opportunities to escape, _nothing._

Two hours. Three. She’s waist-deep and her knuckles feel swollen and tight. She’s sure several splinters have worked their way into her skin and she wants nothing more than to cast the shovel aside and try to work them out with her fingernails, but her hands feel welded in place around the wood of the handle. She doesn’t think she could pull them away from it if she tried. She knows it’d hurt like a bitch if she did. She doesn’t try.

Four hours.

She wonders what Brax is doing. He’s almost certainly noted her absence by now, and if he’s seen the note he’ll have also twigged to the fact that tracking down the killer did _not_ go as simply and easily as she’d planned. He’s probably looking for her right now. She hopes he’s looking for her right now. Her head hurts.

She’s so very thirsty.

As the sun begins to rise to its absolute zenith in the unhappy grey-yellow Dellah sky, Benny’s head is only just poking over the edge of the hole in the ground. Eddison says, “Stop,” and she does, after a second. She’s numb and miserable and cold and hot at the same time. Sweat is pouring down her back. Her face and hands and arms are stained with dirt. She stands in the hole and stares up at her former student and doesn’t even try to stop him as he leans down to take the shovel from her, gun never wavering.

“Lay down,” he says.

“You have got to be kidding me,” she says.

“Down,” he repeats, and flicks off the safety of his laser rifle. Benny thinks about last night, drinking wine in Brax’s office and talking about nothing of importance whatsoever. Surrounded by a warm glow and good company. She could practically feel the affection bubbling up between them. She tries to remember what that warm feeling felt like, but all that’s left is the cold.

She lies down. It’s an awkward fit, because she hadn’t dug the hole to be _wide,_ just deep. Her legs are curled up beneath her and she has to fold her arms across her chest. Her neck is bent at a horribly painful angle. None of that is going to matter in a minute. She knows exactly what’s coming next.

And if she starts crying at this point, that’s her business and no-one else’s.

The dirt scatters across her face, damp and warm. The thin sliver of sunlight that hits her from outside of the hole is quickly eclipsed by Eddison’s stocky form, standing right in front of it as he solemnly and silently heaves dirt onto her body.

Incidentally, the third shovelful of dirt is the worst. It’s not the first or the second or the fourth, oh no, it’s the _third_ one out of all of them that scares her the most because that’s when it really does sink in that she’s being buried alive.

“You really don’t want to do this,” says Benny, voice hoarse and strained. He just shrugs; throws another heap of dirt down onto her. It’s not even particularly _heavy,_ but she can feel her chest tightening in premature panic anyway. “Come on, this is – this is just overkill, you don’t – you don’t – don’t -”

He keeps not-talking and keeps shovelling, and soon she gives up trying to reason with him, because all of her energy’s going into not suffocating. She struggles and squirms for as long as she can, trying frantically to keep her head above the slowly accumulating earth, but eventually she can’t do it any longer. Eventually there’s just so much of it and her arms and legs and body are being pinned down by the gradually increasing weight, and the faint watery light from above just _disappears,_ and now she’s alone in the dark.

There's a particular peculiar feeling that envelops you the moment you become aware that your own imminent mortality is about to be fulfilled. It feels like realizing your own potential for the first time in life. It feels like horror because you know you'll never get to embrace that potential because the next few minutes you have aren't nearly enough to do so. It feels like breathing water. It feels like breathing dirt. It feels like the absence of air. It feels like choking on sand and feeling the grit creep up your throat and feeling it strangle you apart from the inside. It feels like it feels like it feels. It feels like _she is afraid to die_ , she has always been afraid to die, but she is only realizing it right now and why did she not realize this sooner? It feels like _no stop it please stop it stop shovelling the dirt onto me I am still alive this is not meant to happen to people who are still alive_. It feels like a horror movie. It feels like something that should never happen in real life. It feels like drowning on land, it feels like being packed in clay, it feels like worms. It feels like _why are there so many worms, there's shouldn't be this amount of worms in this amount of dirt._ It feels like _worms but I think I am imagining the worms but goddess do they feel real_. It feels like _stop this please stop this now stop stop stop I am not ready for this oh no oh no oh no._ It feels like human cruelty for no reason. It feels like _get off me. It feels like I can't breathe._ It feels lik _e dirt feels like worm feels like earth drowning earth worm dirt hunger silence silence black black drowned –_

He can’t see her anymore, she thinks – hopes – so she tries to claw at the dirt above her, to try to hollow out some semblance of a space where she can at least pretend to hope to try to breathe, but it’s so much heavier than she remembers and all she can do is _squirm._ She manages to get an arm up, worm it all the way through the dirt until it’s sticking right up above her, but she can’t feel any difference in the soil above. Can’t get any purchase on it, can’t claw it away from her even though she can feel her lungs closing up and stuttering with the effort. She knows she can’t be all that deep, not really, she hadn’t been digging for all that long, but it feels like she’s a million miles below Dellah’s surface, drowning in wet warm-cool blackness.

Benny knows that she’s going to die here.

She is there for an hour, a day, a thousand years, and she can feel herself rotting apart. She must be more dirt and bone than flesh and blood at this point, she thinks. It’s all she can taste. She can’t breathe, has never been able to breathe. The press of natural, unrelenting absolution from above is almost comforting. She fits here, cocooned in her little pocket of darkness that moulds to engulf her form exactly and entirely.

There is something beneath her. Something vast and hungry with jaws like a horizon being split wide open and tendrils like insidious roots, worming their inevitable way through the dark. She can feel them, vibrating as they squirm towards her from below. Thin and sinewy and impossibly strong, they loop around her wrists and chest and begin the slow, tortuous process of dragging her _deeper._ She is so impossibly deep in the earth already.

Claws, through the darkness. Not below, above. Bright, flashing. There is something monstrous roaring her name. She shies away from them – the claws, the voice, the brightness of it all – instinctively and the under-roots pull her close, whispering, _yes, come away, come away to us,_ and she feels a particularly twisted one hook all the way around her neck. There are worms beneath her skin and there is dirt in her lungs and the song of beneath is so beautifully tempting that for a long, long moment she almost wants to give into it.

The monstrous thing above her roars her name again, and twisted angry fingers swipe through the earth above her, passing over her buried, rotting head and missing her entirely. Her hand twitches upwards to meet it, and her lips form a name. No sound comes out, but the earth creeps in and now she is choking on it. Her arm twitches out again, and she’s not sure how much of it is her and how much of it is a reflex.

Fingers through the earth again. This time, they catch her hand and hold on tight and don’t let go. Even when she starts to squirm and fight against the contact. Even when she realizes that grabbing the hand was a mistake and it’s so much safer down here, down below. She matches the roar of above, calls back her own protest, _just leave me here._

“Bernice!” comes the cry once more; the growl, the unearthly rasp from above. The earth cracks open and the light seeps in, razor-hot and burning into her. Claws dig into her arms, piercing all the way through her cracked decaying skin and cutting through the rotted worm-eaten bones and out the other side. There is no blood, because she’s been in here far too long to bleed anymore. She is being dragged upwards, away from the growing, loving embrace of the beneath. She screams, and she doesn’t even recognize herself.

The roots under her skin snap and tear in a symphony of agony, and with every connection severed she fights even more fiercely, desperate to be buried again. The monster is unrelentless. It tugs and heaves and drags her up, up, up. The brightness is both unimaginable and unimaginably painful. The light breeze is like acid against her raw, filthy skin. She remembers what eyes are and squeezes her shut tight, and then lashes out, clawing for the monster’s own. She wants to go back. She thinks she can hear herself begging to go back.

“No, don’t, here _–_ come here,” says the monster, and she is drawn into soft, scented darkness. She clings to and scratches at its arms, protesting and sobbing. Its claws are here at her back, smoothing along her spine. A devil’s song right in in her ear. “I’ve got you. Here.” It scares her, it disgusts her, she wants to pull away; it won’t let her. “Bernice, Benny, you’re out, you’re fine, it’s okay – he’s dead, he’s gone, you’re going to be fine, _shh..._ ”

The lies taste so sweet to her tired mind. She refuses to be placated so easily. She beats angrily at its horrible spiny back, tries to get a purchase on its jagged ragged horns and push it back and away from her. Nothing works. Nothing will ever work, it’s got such a horribly tight grip on her and it’s never going to let her go. Finally she stops, exhausted, and allows herself to cling to it.

“I hate you,” she mourns, arms tightening around its back. “I hate you, I hate you – ”

“I know,” it says, “oh, Benny, I know. I’m sorry.”

And then the rest is darkness.

*

When Benny wakes, she’s in her apartment. The lights are dim, the curtains drawn. There’s a dim echo of panic ringing through her entire body, and she feels like absolute _shit._

Her bedroom door is open, just a crack, and there’s quite a bit of noise coming from the kitchen. Clattering, clanging, the sound of water boiling. Some sort of delicious smell, too; it makes her stomach cramp up a bit with anticipation. She’s very hungry.

“Hello?” she calls, and is surprised to realize how croaky and rough her voice is. And then she tenses as she remembers. The grave. The dirt. The monster. Although... no, there hadn’t been a monster, had there?

The clattering and clanging ceases, there’s a distant mutter, and then Brax’s voice rings out through the apartment. “I’d advise upon taking a shower, or at least washing up somewhat. There should be clean towels in the en-suite, if I’m not mistaken.”

Braxiatel is here. It all fills her with a certain amount of deja-vu. Waking up after not expecting to ever wake up again, an unexpected Time Lord in her apartment, Joseph... where is Joseph, anyway? She would have expected him to be getting everywhere by now with his boring unpleasant semi-bureaucratic robot-ness. It’s not like she minds, she’s not really in the mood to be bothered by him right now, but it is strange.

She files that all away to deal with later, because a shower does actually sound rather good right now. She carefully swings herself out of bed, wincing as her bare feet hit the carpet. She’s filthy, head-to-toe. Still in the clothes she’d been buried in, because apparently Brax hadn’t changed her out of them, out of courtesy or awkwardness or... something. She isn’t sure if she would have minded if he had. Either way, her sheets and her room are going to need some serious spring-cleaning to get the grime out.

The lights in the bathroom are already on, and the promised towels are there, too. Benny starts up the shower and sets it running to hot. She doesn’t get in, though. Instead, she stands at the sink and regards herself in the mirror.

Most of the dirt has been wiped carefully from Benny’s face and exposed bare skin, but it’s still there. She’s still in the same clothes. She stares at herself blankly, traces along the teartracks still visible on her cheeks. She lifts up her shirt and tries to find where the under-roots had pierced her flesh and where the worms had eaten their way through her, but can’t find anything but smooth, unblemished skin.

She undresses, gets into the shower. Shuts her eyes, sighs as she scrubs the last traces of an early grave from her body until her skin’s just short of being red and raw. Stands there, feels the steam curling up around her and the water hitting her back and head like nails.

Gets out. Redresses. Move on. Compartmentalize. Get over it, Summerfield, get on with living your life.

She comes into the kitchen, towel still draped around her shoulders. Her hair is damp and clings to the back of her neck. There’s Brax at the stove, and he’s managed to unearth an apron, and he’s cooking. _Cooking._ Not baking croissants, but actually properly cooking on a stove that hasn’t seen any use since she moved in apart from heating up canned food.

She stands and watches him for a while, revelling in the strangeness of it. Feeling an unexpected warmth well up in her chest as he hums lost little snatches from _The Marriage Of Figaro._ She can tell he hasn’t noticed her yet, because if he had, he’d be putting effort into getting the tune exactly right and hitting all the right notes.

When he pauses and starts whistling something that sounds a lot like Offenbach, she knows he’s noticed her, and she clears her throat.

“Hi,” she says, a bit croakily.

He turns. “Benny,” he says, eyes crinkling up at the corners. He takes a step forward, like he’s about to embrace her but stops as she flinches slightly, an entirely involuntary movement that nonetheless chills the room ever-so-slightly. “Sit down,” he invites instead, nudging a chair out from the kitchen table with an elegant little flick of one foot. “It should be ready soon.”

She brushes away the immediate uneasiness and grins. It makes her face ache and her eyes hurt like she’s about to start crying but she grins anyway. “You’re making me breakfast,” she says simply.

“You’re stating the obvious,” he rejoins, smiling back. There’s so much warmth there. How could she ever have thought of his hands as claws; horns crawling up from the base of his skull into a jagged, fractured crown wreathing his head – _no._

“Are we going domestic?” she asks as she sits down. “Is that what’s happening?”

“Domesticity sounds simultaneously distinctly unpleasant in its dullness, and the greatest honour in the world to share with you,” he tells her, and scrapes the spatula he’s holding speculatively across the pan held in his other hand. “But, no. I rather thought you’d appreciate some form of sustenance after all that you’ve been through today.”

For a second, she’d almost managed to forget it all. “Ah,” she says. “Mm. Yeah, that.” She squints over at the windows. The sky outside is dark, but it’s impossible to work out what time of night it is. “Was that really this morning?”

“Afternoon, technically,” says Brax. He flips something. His body’s shielding it from view, but it does smell excellent. “You’ve been sleeping for hours. It’s just turned thirteen-thirty.”

Nearly midnight. And yet here he is, cooking for her. She wonders if he’d spent the entire time here. Wonders... about a lot of things. There’s a lot to wonder about.

“So,” she says, as conversationally as she can. “I got buried alive. That’s a fun thing.”

“ _Fun_ being a relative term, of course.”

“How long was I-?” Benny says, unsure if she really wants the answer or not.

A sigh. His back is still turned to her as he fiddles with the stove. She can tell he’s not actually doing anything important with it, because she knows for a fact that he’d finished cooking the food nearly a minute ago. He’s stalling. She doesn’t blame him. “I believe... you had been under for approximately a minute when I arrived,” he says eventually, reluctantly.

“Oh,” she says. And now she doesn’t know what to think.

“He’d only just finished filling in the... grave.” Brax turns, and places a plate, in front of her. Nothing complicated, just mashed potatoes and sausages. Bangers and mash. Gravy on the side. She almost wants to laugh at the blatant absurdity of it all, but his words keep her expression frozen and her mind reeling with the possibilities. “I took care of him, and then pulled you out.”

It’s such a simple way of phrasing it. _Took care of him. Pulled her out._ As if he hadn’t killed one of her former students in what she can only assume to have been a moment of extreme, pure rage. As if she hadn’t been kicking and screaming and sobbing the entire time.

“Something was eating me,” she says. “When I was down there.” Waits for the reaction.

His poker face is, as always, impressively impasssive. It doesn’t hurt that his back’s to her, so she can’t really see what he’s thinking. “Literally eating you?”

“Pulling me down. Working its way into my body.” She shudders reflexively, the aftershocks of the memory still tingling unpleasantly beneath her skin. “A few minutes isn’t nearly long enough to start hallucinating like that, is it?”

“Perhaps not,” he says.

“And it felt like longer.” She stares at the table, at the swirling, grainy patterns melting through the fake wood. She’s not mentioning the whole horrible-monster-thing to him. It’d feel... _insulting_ , after he’d pulled her out like that, to say the least. “Maybe I’m losing my mind. It would explain why I went off on my own like that, at least.”

“I’d advise you to be a bit kinder to yourself,” he says, eyes dark with concern and sympathy. “Keep in mind that you had been out in that field for hours before the... ah, burial even began to take place. That would be concerning to anyone at all, I believe. And for all we know, the late Mr Bright drugged you at some point during the proceedings.”

“Don’t know when he would’ve,” mutters Benny, but... yes. She does feel a bit better. “Well, thank you,” she says eventually. She toys with her fork. “ _Really_ , thank you. Not just the meaningless sort of thank-yous we sometimes do, this is... I can’t even _start_ to try to properly thank you for this.”

He freezes, and it would be imperceptible but she _knows_ him, knows how Time Lords show their emotions all over their face in the subtlest of ways and all over their bodies where they think nobody can see.

“Don’t,” he says, eventually. “Please. Don’t. Benny...”

She can’t hide the faint flinch when he goes to stand behind her, but that’s just her brain being stupid. She doesn’t flinch when he takes the shower towel still around her shoulders, and adjusts it. Pulling it taut, pressing it firmly around her. It’s like he’s trying to hug her without touching her. It’s remarkably endearing, in an awkward Brax sort of way.

“It was the right thing to do,” he says. “No – it was – more than that, it was the _only_ thing to do. Don’t you dare thank me for doing the bare minimum. What sort of friend would I have been if I’d left you down there? It’s a dreadful way to go, if nothing else. You deserve so much better.”

“I deserve a _better death_?” she says, with a choked little laugh, and then grabs at his hand, squeezing at it tight. “Oh, you’re dreadful. You’re so bad at this. Thank you, thank you so much.”

He lets out a little offended-sounding chuckle, and squeezes it back. Cold and slightly clammy. His hand’s bigger than hers, but the fingers are long and thin; pianist’s fingers. She wonders if he plays.

“So we _are_ BFFs?” she says as she releases his hand, with a quirk of her mouth and an ironic little wriggle of her pinkie finger.

“Forever and ever and ever,” Brax deadpans. His tiny smile matches hers perfectly. “And if you really feel the need to thank me...” He sits down across from her, and pushes the plate of food towards her. “You _could_ make a start with eating this.”

Functionally, mechanically, she _is_ hungry. In practice, she feels like she’d never be able to eat again. Forcing food past her lips, down her throat – but. “I’ll try,” she says. “No promises, though.”

“Just do your best,” he tells her.

“It’s all I ever do,” she says, spearing a chunk of sausage with her fork, and saluting him lazily with it.

And, well. The breakfast _is_ rather delicious.

*

The next day, they receive word that Eddison Bright’s body has gone mysteriously missing – in fact, had disappeared almost the minute it had been left alone.

“I mean,” says Benny – still wrapped up tightly in a blanket on the couch with Brax right next to her. “It’s not as if he’s going to do anything else. He’s _dead._ ”

“Yes,” says Brax absently, returning to the book he had been reading before the message came in. “That’s true. But...?”

He’s giving her space. She appreciates it, appreciates the sentiment behind it, but wishes that he’d stop sitting on the other end of the couch. It almost feels pointed. His skin is cold and his angles are sharp but having another living, breathing person right next to her would be the most perfect thing in the world right now. She also wishes there was an easy way to ask for this which didn’t make her feel like tearing her own hair out.

“But...” She grimaces. “Look, I can’t imagine any reason someone might want to steal a murderer’s body that would be a _good_ sort of reason. Or at the very least, I can’t imagine one that helps me sleep better at night.”

“Revenge, perhaps,” Brax offers, and turns a page. “Or closure. I can easily imagine the families of one of his victims wanting to exact some kind of inscrutable retaliation on his remains. I can almost respect it.”

“Mm,” she says, and curls the edges of the blanket tighter around herself. “It’s almost... I don’t know. There’s a word here that I’m looking for, and I can’t place it. Sinister, maybe? I can’t stop thinking about the copycat murderer. We never found them, and my gut tells me that whoever they were, they might have something to do with this.”

Brax lowers the book slowly, looking right at her. Those piercing grey eyes of his. He looks, and the corners of his mouth tighten, and he sighs. “There’s nothing we can do about it now, Benny.”

“I suppose not.”

“We’ll just have to wait and see what comes next,” he says.

Benny breathes out. Looks to the window, and sees mist and watery morning sunlight filtering through.

“Yes,” she says. “Wait and see.”

*


	2. sanquette

*

_the wine-kegs have run dry at last, the world is red and still –  
come sit at this banquet with me, come and drink your fill  
don’t fret about the broken bones, or fret about the spill  
the table’s set, the earth is ripe, so let it drink its fill_

*

Eddison Bright’s room smells dreadful, like rotting dirt and a thousand unwashed jockstraps. It stinks like there’s a decomposing body stuffed into the walls (there isn’t, they’ve checked) and to say that it looks like a pigsty would be a grievous insult against the pigs. Benny doesn’t know what she expected to find here.

The location hasn’t been cleared by law enforcement just yet, but as a member of the investigation team (somewhat unofficially, but still), and also as a _surviving victim_ of the guy, she’d been authorized to come in and look over it for any clues to a case that is quickly wrapping up and becoming as cold as Eddison Bright’s body probably is, wherever it is now.

“I’m still on the payroll, aren’t I?” Benny had said. Because she is. Apparently she’s now on an official list of Dellah consultants somewhere, although she can’t imagine the list is very long. It’s not as if Dellah is a very big planet, and up until now, crime had actually been fairly minimal.

Benny _really_ doesn’t know what she expected to find here.

It’s disgusting, but that’s par for the course. It’s a university student’s room like any other. It’s all the normal amounts of disgusting for a normal antisocial wreck of a man in his twenties. It’s not like there’s eldritch runes on the walls and blood sacrifices dripping down into the carpet or any of that. The closest any of it comes to _that_ is the small collection of notebooks detailing names and places and locations and burial styles, and that’s already been taken away as evidence.

Benny scans the room and, quite abruptly, sees something that forensics somehow managed to miss. She’s got gloves on, so contamination isn’t at all a problem. She bends down, picks it up, examines it.

A long, fine strand of curly ginger hair. It looks like humanoid hair, even.

“Now, what are you doing here...?” Benny mutters, and frowns. “None of the victims had ginger hair. I think I’d remember something like that.” She looks around for an evidence bag, and finds one in a pile of forensic equipment just by the door. She deposits it, and then, after a second of hesitation, pockets it without really knowing why.

This is just grim, pointless curiosity, she knows. Eddison Bright is dead and... well, not _buried_ , not as far as they know. Even though that might be a fitting fate, or maybe just entirely too on-the-nose. But either way, he’s dead and gone and whatever he had been trying to accomplish by burying dozens of people ritualistically isn’t a problem she has to deal with, not anymore.

If closure of any sort to the events of nearly a week ago is something that she’d been looking for here, it’s definitely not something that she’s found. But she can’t bring herself to be entirely too surprised. She heads down the rickety stairs to the ground floor of the Sable Sun, nods to the servitor-droids still milling around, and leaves.

She’s got a date to keep, after all.

*

“I’m only saying – the next time you get kidnapped by a psychopath and shoved into an early grave, it’d be nice if you could _let me know?_ ”

“I _did_ let you know,” says Benny with a faint groan, pushing the screen away from her face. It ripples and glows with the pressure, sliding smoothly back to rest against the far wall. “I sent you the news link and everything, and I said ‘yes, fine’, when you told me you wanted to talk. What else do you want for me?”

“Maybe I don’t want to find out from a news feed, days after the fact. Maybe I want to hear it direct from the source when my wife nearly gets killed because, oh, I don’t know, I actually _care_ about you and want to know when you _nearly die!_ ”

“Ex-wife,” says Benny dully, already regretting this. “Jason – ”

On the other side of the feed, Jason lets out a huff of a sigh, and slumps back into his chair. “Yeah, I know, I _know._ I’ll tone it down a bit, I’m sorry.”

“Good,” Benny says, and sighs too. “I didn’t expand on it because, honestly? I don’t want to think about it all that much. It’s edging dangerously close to the top of the ‘Bernice Summerfield Had A Traumatic Adventure Experience’ leaderboard. Which is a very exclusive and very depressing sort of leaderboard, as I’m sure you know.”

“Intimately,” he agrees solemnly, and then hesitates for the briefest second before saying, “Listen, the reason I called – I wanted to let you know. I’m actually catching the next shuttle over to Dellah.”

Benny starts, and sits up. “What? No, you – ”

“And before you say I don’t _have_ to, you’re right, I don’t but I want to. I want to be there for you, Benny, because it really looks like you need someone.”

“I was actually going to say, ‘you’re probably the last person I want trying to offer me comfort right now, apart from maybe notorious intergalactic terrorist Sheldukher, most wanted criminal of the twenty-fourth century’,” Benny says.

“Ow,” says Jason, looking genuinely upset. “Okay, _ow_ , Benny. That hurt.”

“...Maybe that _was_ a little uncalled for, but... Jason, what I’m trying to say is that I don’t especially want comfort. I just want things to go back to normal around here, or – you know, whatever passes for normal in my life.”

“Systemic repression and denial,” says Jason dryly. “How healthy.”

“Oh, like _you_ can talk.”

“Anyway,” he continues, “it’s not like you can do anything to stop me, and _besides –_ I already booked the ticket.”

Benny drags a pillow over her face and imagines screaming into it at the top of her lungs. “ _Jason,_ ” she says, muffled.

“I’ll be there in a week,” Jason says, and when she pulls the pillow away she sees that he’s regarding her with crossed arms and no hint of joking playfulness. He really does seem to be serious about this. Then again, he’s also _extremely_ serious about the act of consistently churning out mediocrely-to-poorly written alien erotica, so really it’s anyone’s guess how valid he actually is about doing this. “Less than, hopefully.”

“A-? Oh, _Goddess,_ you went with one of those skeevy transport ships, didn’t you? Where _are_ you?”

“I don’t think I can legally tell you that unless you change your mind on a lot of my hobbies, very fast,” Jason tells her primly.

Benny resists the urge to sigh, because talking with her ex-husband tends to make her want to do that a lot. “You – _ugh._ Just try not to get your liver stolen by organ traffickers in transit, I guess.”

“Don’t worry, I always carry a knife with me on D-Class transport,” says Jason, and chances a glance off to the side of the camera. “Speaking of – I should go pack.”

“Suppose you don’t,” Benny suggests, folding her hands behind her head.

“You’re suggesting I turn up on your doorstep with only the clothes on my back?”

“No, I’m suggesting you don’t come at all – I can’t stress how much I _don’t_ want that. And there’s no way you’re staying with me. Find somewhere else to stay. I have it on good authority that there’s plenty of affordable places to board up on Dellah.”

“You’ll let me visit, at least?”

“I make absolutely no promises whatsoever,” says Benny, and rolls her eyes. “But yes, probably. I guess I’ll see you then.”

“All right,” says Jason, and then pauses. “Take care of yourself, okay? I probably won’t be able to call during transit, so... good luck with everything.”

“I don’t need luck,” says Benny. “All I need is some peace and quiet. And I’m not going to have a problem getting that.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right. I mean, how much trouble can you possibly get up to in a week or less?” Jason says.

This isn’t a prophecy, exactly, but it might as well be.

*

When Benny arrives at the St Oscar’s campus the next morning, there’s a sizable crowd gathering outside the university gates – students, professors, and miscellaneous passers-by alike, all murmuring and muttering amongst themselves.

Benny has a class to get to, and as much as she’d like to stand and gawk at whatever’s caught everyone’s attention so readily this time, she’s got a schedule to get back to and normalcy to regain. She pushes past them, intending to slide right through the gates and hurry at double-time to the lecture hall. The crowd is getting thicker by the moment, and louder, and then she looks up and catches sight of what they’re all gawking at.

“Oh,” she says, and stops dead in her tracks. Something in her chest twists unpleasantly. “Oh, that’s a body.”

Because, as if she hadn’t already seen enough of them to last her a damned _lifetime_ by this point, there it is. They’re Pakhar, whoever they are. Small, rodent-like, furry, currently strung up and dangling from a lamp-pole right in front of the gates. Totally, unquestionably, _completely_ fucking dead.

The crowd’s murmuring is sliding neatly in the ‘hysteria’ direction. Benny, frozen in place, can’t stop looking at the Pahkar person. Their golden fur is matted with dew and condensation, and the thick energy cables that have been ripped apart and repurposed to hold them up twist around their throat, making their face bulge unpleasantly. A thin but steady stream of some black liquid she can’t identify drips down from beneath their clothes into a tarry black puddle on the ground.

Benny gaze travels past them, and focuses, and then she says, “Oh, this really is the worst possible timeline for me, isn’t it,” as she sees there’s four more Pakhar on the next four lamp-poles, all similarly strung up and dripping. She shudders.

“Someone call the crukking police; I’m not dealing with this,” she says loudly, above the noise of the crowd, and stalks off through the gates.

She’s five minutes late to her lecture. Physically, that is.

After fifteen minutes of just sitting there in the lecturer’s chair, staring blankly up at the ceiling, one of her students, one of them who’s sitting close to the front of the classroom, clears her throat and says, “Um, uh, Professor Summerfield?”

“Hi,” she says. “That’s me, yes. What did you need?”

The student shuffles her notes around awkwardly for a moment or two. “I was mainly wondering if you were planning on, um, uh, teaching? Today?”

“Yes, right,” says Benny. “Teaching is a thing that I _am_ supposed to be doing. Thank you for reminding me, er-?”

“Shanata.”

“Shanata, right. I _will_ end up forgetting that, for the record; don’t take it too personally – look, did you lot see what was going on outside the gates this morning?”

“The people hanging outside?” says someone else.

Benny nods, and slides into a more normal sitting position so she’s actually looking at all of them. “So you did. Good. I have a quick question for all of you, then. What the fuck?”

There’s a short silence.

“Should you-?” someone begins to ask.

Benny waves her hand. “Don’t worry about it, I have tenure. I ask once more: what the _fuck?_ Dellah’s been averaging maybe one murder every five years for as long as I can remember – _less than that,_ even – and then this month rolls around and suddenly everyone wants to try their hand at playing Norman Bates! Old Earth movie reference,” she adds hastily, “don’t ask, and don’t look it up, it’s not as great as everyone says it is. _Point is,_ this is getting ridiculous. Also the fact that you lot just apparently... walked right past all of it and filed into the lecture hall like nothing’s wrong? What’s up with _that?_ ”

“Well, exams start in two weeks, I’ve already missed like, half of these lectures, and I’m starting to panic,” says Scott Owens, a freshman sitting in the back row. “Not even God herself could stop me from getting to class on time at this point.”

There’s a murmur of agreement that rises up from the seats.

“No, yeah, I absolutely get it,” Benny says. “And... okay, now that I’m thinking about it, you probably want me to teach you. For that archaeology exam. In two weeks.” She considers this for a moment. It sounds like the worst thing in the world. Archaeology is the furthest thing from her mind right now, and she can’t imagine running a lengthy discussion on primary and secondary and tertiary sources for longer than five entire minutes. So... “Look, I’ll make the final exam multiple-choice and ridiculously easy if you lot let me talk about something else entirely for the entirety of our lecture today,” she offers. “All I need you to do is nod and look interested, and maybe shout out encouragement if I look like I’m losing it.”

A split second of hesitation, then a loud cheer goes up from the classroom, which sounds a lot like agreement to her. Benny pushes her notes off the side of the lecturer’s podium, grabs a holopen, and goes up to the screen hanging across the front wall.

“Any of you do criminology?” she asks, as she starts to write in bold blocky letters, one name after another. About four people raise their hands. “There’s a start. Any of you recognize these names?”

Zachary McCarthy, Lenoxx TH-11-A, Pex-Marton Reda, Marissa Keyes, Jesionn Jones. Corbenton Tizz.

“I think Marissa is in my art therapy class?” A girl Benny seems to remember is called Anouk suggests tentatively. (No last name? She might have a last name, Benny can’t remember.)

Benny winces. “Er, that would be _was,_ past tense, now. I don’t think she’s going to be coming to art therapy any more. Sorry, that was a really dreadful way to break the news to you, wasn’t it? Maybe I should – ”

“The murders from last week,” says Kai Fox, one of the older students, from near the front, their hand shooting up into the air as if they’re fresh out of primary school and not even older than Benny is. “They’re all the people who got buried!”

“Yo, Professor Summerfield – didn’t you get buried, too?” shouts someone from the middle of the class.

“I’m not talking about that,” Benny snaps, and then takes a breath. “Sorry. Yes, these are all the people that got buried. Yes, I nearly became victim number six. Or seven, depending on how you look at it. That’s actually the thing. See, the sixth person to die – I don’t think he was taken out by the same killer after all. Obviously I didn’t really get much of a chance to check with the _actual_ killer, seeing as I was... well, I didn’t get a chance to check. But if you look at the connections...” She points at each name in turn. “Landlord, study partner, ex-roommate, ex-girlfriend, barista at his local coffeeshop... but no connection to dear Mister Corbenton Tizz, none that I could find.”

“Doesn’t mean it’s not there,” says Anouk. Anouk is one of Benny’s more annoying students, always with the devil’s advocate and smug questions, but sometimes annoying students can be good for getting to the bottom of things. Doesn’t mean they stop being annoying, though.

“I mean, sure,” says Benny. “But you have to admit that it’s pretty weird, right? And then there’s the methodology...” Briefly, she lays out the details of the whole incident, including the whole thing about the lack of marks on Tizz’s hands. It’s been haunting her for a while now, so it’s probably good to get it all out in the open. Probably not as good that she’s dumping it on a classroom of unsuspecting students but, really, they can probably take it.

“I’m not going insane, right?” she asks, spreading her hands wide.

There is a long, long silence as every other person currently in the classroom stares at her, unblinking.

“No, this makes perfect sense, and you sound like a completely rational and sane person who’s not losing her mind at all,” says a green-haired young person sitting in the middle rows. “Please, do carry on.”

“Oh, good,” says Benny, relieved. “Okay, change of topics. Just a slight one, mind. This is going to get tasteless,” she warns, after a second of consideration.

“We’re learning how to do professional graverobbing, this was borderline tasteless already,” points out Anouk.

Benny opens her mouth to argue, and then closes it, shaking her head. And she begins to draw. She’s not the most accomplished of artists, but even so she can manage to sketch out a rough approximation of a faceless Pakhar body, hanging from a pole, blood dripping down in a thin, steady stream. It’s not hard to summon up the details. Even a brief look had been enough to near-permanently engrain itself into her mind.

“So,” she says, finishing up the sketch, “I’m not claiming to be an expert on this sort of thing, but people don’t usually kill without a reason. And it doesn’t even need to be a _good_ reason. Sometimes the reason can be ‘I’m feeling angry and I want to kill people’, but that’s still a _reason._ ” She takes a step back. “And in my experience, the more complicated that reason is, the more elaborate the presentation gets. And, if you look at what happened this morning...”

She gestures to the sketch wordlessly.

“Pretty elaborate,” offers Scott Owens, from the back. “Are you saying that whoever did it... had a complicated reason for doing it?”

“I’m saying that they could easily have just killed all of these people and dumped them in the ocean or something,” Benny says. “And I’m wondering why not. I’m wondering _why not,_ and I’m wondering it _hard._ ”

Silence.

“Uh,” says Kai Fox. “Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why are you wondering that? Aren’t you an archaeology professor? Why are you telling us this?”

“Well, you see,” says Benny, “I may or may not be in the middle of something resembling a midlife crisis. Except less like ‘midlife’ and more like ‘mortality’. Or maybe ‘murder’. Definitely something beginning with ‘m’. Thank you for the question, Kai – anyone else? Maybe with something relevant, this time?”

This time it’s Shanata from the front few rows that speaks up. “The way they were hung up. It’s... kind of purposeful, right?”

“All of them _did_ look like they were strung up in the same sort of way,” Benny says, after glancing quickly back to the sketch. “All with one right arm dangling down. Okay, that’s something! We’ve got something! Give Shanata a big hand, everyone; we have a grand total of one person who’s asked a sensible, relevant question.”

“Well, I wouldn’t say it was _sensible,_ ” says Shanata, but she looks pretty pleased with herself nonetheless.

“Take the compliment and cut your losses while you still can,” Benny warns. “Okay. So the question we need to ask ourselves is this: what sort of person has a vendetta against an entire species? Because with the amount of Pakhars out there, and the variety of fur colors and features, it’s not like they were all from the same family. I assume.”

“So, maybe it wasn’t a personal sort of killing thing,” says someone else. “Maybe there’s something special about Pakhars in particular that meant they wanted to get rid of a bunch of them, all at once? Medical or biological?”

Benny frowns at the whiteboard, just now realizing exactly how much she doesn’t know.

“Yeah,” she says, slowly. “Yeah – maybe.” She shakes herself. “You know what, class dismissed. I’ve rambled at you about not-archaeology stuff for too long. Sorry. But also feel free to scram. I’ll get you the details of that test later.”

*

When she checks her inbox that evening, there’s a message from Braxiatel inviting her to dinner that evening. Apparently he’s getting back into gourmet cooking – which implies, of course, that he’d been _into it_ at some point in the past. Knowing him and judging by the quality of breakfast a month ago, he’s probably at professional level, and barely even makes it look hard. And it’s definitely going to be delicious.

So it’s with some regret that she declines the offer, suggesting that they reschedule for some other time. She has a lead to follow up on tonight, and unfortunately that’s going to end up taking up most of her evening.

This is the sort of lead that’s kind of spontaneous, that wasn’t arranged or scheduled, and in fact the person (or maybe people) that she’s intending to talk to doesn’t even know she’s coming. She’s got her most casually professional leather jacket on and a pair of sensible boots (just in case any running should become necessary), and she’s walking down the central street of Dellah City for a pleasant evening trip into the morgue.

Because this is just her life now, apparently.

The morgue is pretty empty, just like literally every other time she’s visited in the last few weeks. It hadn’t properly registered with her on her previous visits, probably because she’d had a lot on her mind on all of those occasions. But it _is_ strange. And getting stranger the more she thinks about it. Nobody at the front desk, nobody in the little side office that she went in to talk with law enforcement in. She doesn’t know if there’s a ‘rush hour’ sort of time for morgues, but if there is, this definitely isn’t it.

Nobody in the labs – dead or alive. Well, presumably there’s dead people in the storage cabinets, but she doesn’t want to spare too much thought for them. There is, in fact, only one living breathing entity in the entirety of the (admittedly rather small) morgue building – a man, in one of the small administration offices off to one side of the main labs. He’s sitting behind a desk, and doesn’t seem to notice Benny when she comes in.

He’s on the shorter end, mostly humanoid and is extremely fluffy-looking. Not that he has fur or anything of the sort, but more in the sense that his hair is all messed up and sticking out everywhere, and his clothes are rumpled and puffy. He looks like he’s just spent the last half hour in front of a high-speed wind generator.

He types at the datapad in front of him intently, looking dazed and a bit dreamy. Benny has to clear her throat several times to get his attention.

When he does look up, the dazedness in his eyes does not disappear. “Mm... can I help you?”

“No idea, let’s hope so,” Benny says. “I’m Professor Bernice Summerfield, and I was wondering if you could take the time to answer some – _uh._ ” She blinks, nonplussed, as he turns away even as she’s talking and just starts tapping away at his datapad, seemingly uninterested in what she’s saying. “ – answer... some... questions. Er – look, not to be rude or anything, but are you actually listening to me?” She waits for a second. “...Hello?”

“Sorry, were you saying something?” he says suddenly, looking up. She might take it as passive-aggression, but it’s far too earnest and genuine for that.

“I was wondering if you could answer some questions,” Benny says. “Such as, where is everyone?” She waits for a response, but is vastly disappointed, because he just goes back to typing.

Frustrated, she leans forwards and yanks the datapad sharply away from him. He startles, and gives her a wide-eyed look of puzzlement. “Yes?”

“Hi,” she says. “Bernice Summerfield, looking for answers, nice to meet you – are you terribly busy right now?”

“Oh, no. I’m – no, not busy at all. V’Ne,” he says. “Ah – uh – my name. I’m V’Ne. Colony Six, Clone Batch 75. And you are...?”

“Bernice Summerfield,” she repeats, and scans him for any signs that he’s going to start drifting off or whatever the hell he’s been doing. But no, he maintains eye contact easily – albeit looking very, very confused while doing so. “Got a few questions for you tonight. Let’s start with a big one. Where’s the rest of the morgue staff?”

“Oh, they got laid off,” V’Ne replies, almost instantly.

“... _All_ of them?”

“They weren’t required.”

Benny waits for him to expand on this, but he just sits there. Fluffy and attentive. “Nice and ominous, thank you, V’Ne. You’re the only one left?”

“I’m perfectly capable,” he says, and now he looks just the slightest bit affronted.

“...And you’re dealing with all these new bodies? All by yourself?” She glances back towards the lab. “Including the Pakhars that got, er, strung up, right?”

“Haven’t quite got around to them yet,” he admits, running a hand through his enthusiastic puff of hair. “Heavy workload, you know how it is! And it’s not as if there’s any family or anything on-planet that’s keen for it to be over and done with – ”

“Because the whole family got taken out at once, right,” Benny says with a wince as the realization dawns. “Yikes. Okay, I doubt you’re going to let me see any of the records, since I’m not consulting anymore – ”

“‘Fraid not, could get fired for that – thanks for asking, though.

“ – yep, figured. So, instead – you’re fully trained? Know all the major xeno-body types, how to tear them apart and stitch them back together, all that medical jazz?”

“Yes ma’am,” he says, sitting up a bit straighter. He grins, and it seems to be a naturally crooked sort of grin. “Graduated top of my class and everything. I know what I’m doing, it’s why I’m the last one here.”

“Nice one, V’Ne,” she says, smiling back. “Last question, then.” She hunts around in her satchel for a moment. “What does this look like to you?” she asks, holding up an extremely shitty five-minute sketch on a scrap torn from the back of her diary. She’s never been the universe’s greatest artist, nowhere close, but it’s not the quality of it that matters.

V’Ne takes the sketch and examines it with a startling amount of focus, considering how floaty and absentminded he’s been all this time. “This isn’t a very good drawing.”

“Thank you for pointing that out for me,” Benny says dryly. “Extremely helpful and relevant. Any further comments on my artistic skills, or are you going to answer the question?”

He blinks, but doesn’t otherwise respond to the jab. “Like I said, it’s not a very good drawing, but at a guess – it looks a lot like a modified IV drip?”

Benny had been a bit annoyed before – just a tad. Maybe mildly frustrated, maybe a lot exhausted. Most of that drains away, replaced with dull exhaustion and an emotion that can only be accurately summed up as _oh no._

“You know, V’Ne,” she says grimly, “that’s kind of exactly what I was afraid of.”

*

_so dream of a network, a vast interlocking pattern of spiral ever downwards, all interconnected yet disparate. Blood flows down, junction to junction and tube to pipe to line, siphoning down and away and towards. Towards what? – that is something that perhaps you are not ready but one day yes yes one day_

_well we shall see_

_for now think on this, this endless web of bloodshed beneath your feet. It has always been there, you’ve only just found the time to notice it at last. The web must be fed. Find the feeder_

_no not the bodies they are inconsequential. They are only a tool, a means of delivery, and so is the source come to think of it but one thing at a time, take it slowly, find her first and then we’ll get to the rest. It’s not hard we know you’ll get there eventually and you have all the time in the world_

_think on this,_

_if it’s only simple biology, how can you bring yourself to call it murder?_

*

The next morning, Benny cancels all her classes and goes to the front of the university to stare at the ground. A very specific bit of ground. The bodies are gone, the crime scene cleared; the only thing she’s guilty of is maybe being a bit creepy. And also there’s the fact that she has a kitchen knife tucked into her bag, and she’s about to do something... a bit weird, for the sake of an investigation that might not even bear all that much fruit. A _lot_ weird, actually. Definitely on the weirder end of everything she’s done.

She raises the kitchen knife to her hand and takes a moment to wonder what the hell she thinks she’s doing. Then she’s moving without thinking. To the palm of her hand it goes, slashing across it in a sharp downwards slash. The pain is sharp but bracing. Practically nothing, really.

Blood wells from the shallow wound, beading along the edge of the cut like morning dew. She holds it upwards, balancing the blood in the palm of her hand, and considers it for a moment.

“What am I _doing,_ ” she mutters, and flicks her hand viciously at the ground. The tiny drops of blood splatter the ground. Spots of darkness against the earth.

The cold, dark, loving, consuming earth –

She shakes off the uncomfortable memory of an early grave, and watches as her suspicions are confirmed. As the blood sinks down into the ground. Not like it should, not naturally; but like it’s being drawn down by an additional force of gravity or by some form of suction. Within seconds, any trace of it having been there is gone.

Benny sits down, leans over the spot where it had been, and lets more blood fall. She gets up close and personal, stares without blinking and sees as the faint red color fades from the ground, drained away downwards.

“Okay,” she says. “Okay.”

She pauses to think, and then pulls out her communicator.

*

Shanata turns up maybe fifteen minutes later, with a long grey scarf bundled around her neck, two shovels and a caramel frappuccino. The frappuccino is not for Benny, she explains. It’s for herself, because being dragged out of bed at an ungodly hour is the sort of situation that calls for gratuitous sugary caffeine.

“It’s eleven thirty-three,” Benny says, checking her watch.

“Exactly,” says Shanata. “Absolutely ungodly. Couldn’t you have got the shovels yourself, though?”

“I could’ve,” Benny says. “But that would mean that I have to dig up this empty plot outside the university all by myself. And what are students for if not for foisting off menial grunt work onto?”

Shanata chugs her frappuccino angrily. “I have to dig? Do I get extra credit for this?”

“Extra credit, sure,” Benny says. She doesn’t know if it works like that. Doesn’t particularly care. “It’s not technically archaeology, I suppose, but I’ll let it slide. Actually, gimme the last of that and I’m make sure it’s double extra credit.”

“That doesn’t exist.”

“You don’t know that.”

Shanata passes her the nearly-empty mug after a second of hesitation.

Benny pries off the lid, downs the last dregs, and tosses it down near her bag. “There we go. Double extra credit, signed, sealed, and stamped. Let’s get digging.”

They do. Well, Shanata does. She starts doing the work. Benny has to kind of psych herself into it. She hadn’t seen this coming, but maybe she should have – the thought of taking a shovel to the ground makes her heart start racing and her palms start sweating and not in the fun ‘I’m so excited to be doing this’ way. No, this is definitely a trauma sort of thing. A ‘my fallible human brain is messing with me because it hates me’ kind of thing. An ‘I’m starting to realize I can’t just think my way out of this one’ kind of thing. Obviously she knows that she isn’t going to end up buried again, it’s just –

_Ugh._ Digging up things is in her literal job description; she can’t afford to be getting all panicky over it all of a sudden.

One shovel of dirt at a time. She can drop the shovel and walk away at any time, it’s going to be _fine._

She starts digging. It’s not dreadful, but it’s not _great_ either.

“Well, this is boring,” says Benny, when the silence becomes too much. “Let’s talk, for no reason at all other than me being bored. What are you up to, Shanata?”

“Mainly digging,” Shanata says. “And wondering why we’re digging up an active crime scene.”

“Oh, so you did notice that,” Benny says. “Clever man. And no, not active. Not anymore.”

“Right, I did notice there weren’t any ‘do not enter’ signs around still. The cops work fast around here.” Shanata rakes a hand through her short hair. “...Is it because of the whole crime scene thing that we’re digging here?”

“Less talking, more unearthing,” Benny says, pitching her own shovel into the ground. “Or, talk and unearth at the same time, actually. Yes, sort of. How close of a look did you get when the, er...”

“When the bodies were here? Not much of one. Why?”

They’ve cleared a sizeable hole. It’s just ground. Just plain soil. Nothing yet. They’ve got to keep going. “Well, I did. And I noticed something pretty interesting about the ground underneath them.”

“Uh, there were strung-up dead people, and you were looking at the ground?”

“Yes. I’m an archaeology professor, didn’t you hear? We’re obsessed with staring at the ground for hours on end. There’s – ” Benny’s shovel hits something hard and metallic, and it sends a sudden jolt through her body, stopping her short. “Shit. Hold that thought. Looks like I’m actually onto something, would you believe that? Here, help me – ”

The hole’s knee-deep, but there’s something underneath it. They knock knees scrambling down into it, and then accidentally bang heads as they both bend down to clear away the dirt from the metallic object. And when they do they both sit back. And now they’re just crouching in a hole in front of the university together, staring down at what they’ve found.

“Huh,” says Shanata. “You know... I don’t know what I was expecting. But I’m pretty sure it definitely wasn’t _that_.”

What they have found is a metal grate, set into the ground. It’s soaked in dried-over coppery residue, encrusted in dirt. It seems to stretch out so much further than where they’ve dug it up – a long line of metal stretching out parallel to the uni fence line, sandwiched in by concrete. And it’s too dark to see exactly what’s beyond the grate, but when Benny presses her hand to it she can feel a faint suction; a coolness flowing into the depths.

It’s not constant. There’s pauses when it stops sucking, when the air rests still and she can almost imagine it’s pushing out, just a bit. She tries not to mentally compare it to breathing, because the implications are already bad enough.

“That’s a lot of blood that’s been through here,” she mutters instead, lifting her hand up to examine it. Flecks of crusty red remain. She makes a face and wipes it off on her trousers. “Ick. More than just those Pakhars could have provided, I mean.”

“Are you saying that this is some kind of... _drainage system?_ ” Shanata says, connecting the dots remarkably quickly. Benny’s not sure if that’s a good thing or not. “Like, specifically-for-murder drainage system? Who even puts something like this here?” She leans down closer. “Also this thing looks, well, not _ancient,_ but definitely not a recent sort of thing. How long has this been going on for?”

“All good questions,” Benny says. “You’re most definitely getting that double-extra-credit. Maybe triple, if I can wrangle it. Another question to add to the pile: where does it lead? And one more - did you bring metal cutters with you, by any chance?”

“Um, _no_ , funnily enough.” Shanata gives her a sideways look of disbelief. “...You’re not actually thinking of going down there, are you?”

Benny thinks about this and quickly realizes that she absolutely does not want to do that under any circumstances. Never mind that she won’t be able to fit through the gap, even if she does somehow manage to prise it open. “No. Never mind, stupid question. There’s better ways of figuring out what’s down there, anyway.”

“Such as?”

“Such as, don’t worry about it,” Benny replies, with a raised eyebrow, “because this is absolutely not your problem anymore, and it could get messy, and I honestly don’t want you to have to deal with it. Not for all the extra credit St Oscar’s has to offer.”

“Professor _Summerfield,_ ” Shanata whines. “You can’t just drag me out of bed for a weird grate mystery and dump me the moment it starts getting interesting.”

“Sorry, kiddo,” Benny says, and stands up. “I may not have any actual guardianship over you, because this isn’t high school or anything, but I still feel responsible. Knowing me, you’ll probably end up getting attacked in some dark alleyway just because you helped me dig this up.”

“ _Fair,_ but... I mean, at least keep me in the loop.” Shanata struggles to her feet, and grabs the shovels from where they’re lying, discarded on the ground. “Hey, should – should we bury this? Is this the kind of weird grate mystery that we need to keep secret?”

“Is there any other kind?” Benny points out, pulling out her communicator.

“Good point,” says Shanata, and starts shovelling dirt back over the grate. “Who are you texting?”

“First name None, last name Of Your Business,” Benny replies, sending off a quick message with a practiced swipe of her fingers. “Are all students always this nosy? I haven’t been one for – well, let’s just say, a good long while.”

“Not nosy, just bored,” Shanata says. “Don’t have to do much studying since you promised us all an easy test, and I’m sick of scrolling social media and seeing a million conspiracy theories about the whole serial-murderer thing. At least this is _sort_ of close to the actual truth, you know?”

“Well, this actually has nothing to do with the no-doubt _fascinatingly_ contrived conspiracy theories springing into form as we speak,” Benny says. “Not directly, anyway. As a matter of fact, I happen to have a dinner date to keep.”

*

“Thanks for rescheduling,” Benny calls, fiddling with the cuffs of her fancy jacket. It comes out duller than she’d expected it to, and she frowns to herself at how unenthusiastic she sounds. She’s been looking forward to this.

Brax doesn’t seem to take offense. He’s in the other room, so it’s not like he can read her face or body language or anything, but maybe there’s other context clues, because he just says, “Of course. Is everything all right?”

“Just tired,” Benny says, and abandons the cuffs in favor of dropping her chin into her folded arms and slumping a bit. She’s so _fidgety_ lately. She needs more sleep. Not that it comes easy these days. (But when had it ever, really?)

From the kitchen – a hiss of steam, a clattering of utensils. Brax has already told her quite firmly that no, he does not need any sort of help tonight, maybe another time; and she had agreed without all that much complaint. _Maybe another time_ does sound nice. She doesn’t feel like cooking tonight. She feels like eating dinner with a very dear friend and just staying here to do it, and definitely not getting up from this spot unless absolutely strictly necessary.

“Students giving you trouble?” comes the belated response.

She debates for a moment over whether to tell him, because he _worries_ even though he never really shows it, and honestly she’s handling it just fine as is, but also. “Technically? Yes. But not mine. And not living ones, either.”

His head pokes through the doorway so fast it’s like he’s mastered the art of teleportation just to stare directly at her, unimpressed, as quickly as he can.

“Bernice,” he says.

“Irving,” she replies.

“ _Benny,_ ” he insists.

“ _Brax,_ ” she contends.

They maintain a fierce stand-off of a staring contest for nearly a full minute before a timer _dings_ behind him, and he lets out the tiniest noise of annoyance. “We’re going to talk about this in a minute,” he tells her, and vanishes back into the kitchen depths.

“Yeah, yeah; I look forward to it with every ounce of my being,” she says, and the kitchen noises resume.

Brax’s apartment is _really_ nice. Ridiculously nice, and definitely not the sort of thing you can afford on a teaching budget, but knowing him he’s probably got millions of dollars in illegally-obtained cash squirrelled away on some distant planetoid. It’s all tasteful dark decor and probably-faux-ebony sideboards and a lot of really expensive-looking paintings and sculptures everywhere. Probably stolen. Almost definitely stolen.

Her gaze drifts, travelling from the kitchen door to the elaborate painting taking up most of the far wall. In warm, dark colors, it depicts a beautiful man, naked body tastefully obscured by a draped cloth being brutally set upon by equally beautiful, slightly-less-naked-than-he-is women. Most of them are brandishing sticks and branches and other makeshift whips. Some of them are just tearing at him with their bare hands. It’s beautifully disgusting and artfully tragic in that way that early eighteenth-century Earth paintings tend to be. Why Brax has it hanging in his _dining room,_ of all places, completely eludes her. Surely there’s got to be less gory scenes somewhere in his collection – something slightly more suited to hanging over his head as he eats?

She’s not sure how long she’s sitting there, lost in strange thoughts that she can’t quite pin down the mood of. But eventually a timer goes _ding_ again, and seconds later, out comes Brax. He’s got his fancy grey shirtsleeves rolled all the way up to his elbows, equally fancy dress pants, and an extremely tacky ‘KISS THE COOK’ apron and the visual dissonance is astounding, as well as mildly hilarious.

When he sees her lips twitching in an effort to hold back the laughter, he looks mildly disgruntled. “It was an Otherstide gift,” he defends.

“I’ll bet,” she says, letting a sideways grin slip out. “I hope you’re not expecting me to follow the written instructions.”

“Please don’t,” he says with a faint sigh. “Or, if you must, on the cheek will suffice.”

“Ah, maybe later,” she says, and gestures vaguely in the direction of the kitchen. “Smells great. Like always.”

The exasperated disgruntlement morphs into something subtler, more pleased. “I came to ask you if you had any preference as to drinks. I can go pull a bottle of wine from the cellar, if you want. As you know, I have many excellent vintages.”

“You have a cellar. Here. In this second-story apartment.”

He pauses, and then says, very carefully and entirely unconvincingly, “No.”

“Right,” she says, and then reluctantly shakes her head. “No, I’ll... water. Or something else, if you have it. But I think I’ll pass on the alcohol tonight.”

“Ah, a rare sign of restraint,” he says. “I’m proud, I really am. Now, I _did_ make apple juice...”

“Apple juice is just a few weeks of fermenting away from being alcoholic,” Benny says. “Which means my taste buds probably won’t tell the difference. Bring it on, I suppose.”

He nods, and goes to leave, but turns back at the last second. “You look lovely,” he adds, almost as an afterthought.

“Flatterer,” she says, lip twitching fondly.

“Flattery _does_ get you everywhere, as they say... and you really didn’t need to come dressed for a party. It’s only the two of us, after all.”

Benny grins and crosses one leg over the other. “Oh, I know. But I thought you’d appreciate the effort.”

She really does love this dress. Long and soft the loveliest shade of blue. She always mentally compares it to the Doctor’s TARDIS whenever she sees it; a weird sort of inescapable association she can’t quite manage to shake, but she’s been told she looks devastatingly poised and sophisticated when she wears it. She’s also been told that the poised and sophisticated bit only tends to last until the third drink, give or take, but she prefers to only listen to personal comments that are actually flattering, so fuck that.

He leave and returns, setting down a chilling chrome pitcher and frosted glasses in the centre of the table, then leaves again. When he re-emerges from the kitchen once more, he’s performing an admirable balancing act – in one arm, a large platter of what looks like mainly cheese and some sort of sausage, liberally spiced and seasoned. The crust is crispy-golden and steam is peeling off the top in great curling wisps. In the other, salad; the fancy sort of salad with fetta and liberal amounts of glazed dressing drizzled over the top.

“I’d clap, but I’m not sure if you’re actually meant to clap for food,” says Benny. “And also, it’s just me, so I feel like it’d come off as... well, mocking.”

“The sentiment is appreciated,” he says with a light laugh, and sets the dishes down with some concentration.

“And so is the food,” Benny says, as he begins to serve her. “What is it? It looks like... mm, I want to say, salami?”

“Close enough. _Queso fundido_.”

“Bless you.”

“Very funny. Old-Earth Mexican in origin, I believe. A classic sort of recipe updated for my own tastes. The chorizo was somewhat hard to source,” he adds, serving himself. “But I promise it’s up to my standards. Which are, as you well know, quite impeccable.”

“Quite,” she says. “Well, I’ll be sure to give you my unfiltered opinion on just how good I think it is after I try it. Just a sec.” She spears a chunk of chorizo, swirling it through the cheese, and brings it to her mouth. The flavor is exquisite – perfectly seasoned, just on the mild end of spicy – and the cheese compliments it in ways she couldn’t have ever dreamed possible. She swallows, lets out a tiny happy noise, and then says, “Just so you know, I _was_ planning on saying it was great even if it had turned out to be absolutely terrible.”

“How kind,” says Brax, resting his cheek on a hand. He hasn’t touched his food yet, instead choosing to watch for her reaction. “And?”

“And as it turns out, I don’t need to flex my admittedly terrible acting skills today.” She grins. “You absolutely nailed it. I should make you cook for me more often.”

“You know I’m always happy to do so,” he returns, and picks up his own fork.

They eat in pleasant, companionable silence for a few minutes.

“So,” says Brax when they’re about halfway through the meal, with a tiny little sigh. “The Pahkar incident.”

“Is that what we’re calling it now?”

“It’s certainly more tasteful than some of the other nicknames the media have been giving it,” he says, to which she starts slightly.

“Oh, the media have got their hands on it already? I hadn’t realized – guess I just wasn’t paying attention. That’s going to be a mess,” she adds with a frown, and spears a carrot with her fork.

“Believe me, it already is.”

“I’m not sure if I regret abandoning all social media for a week or not, now,” she says. “One of my students _did_ mention conspiracy theories – any especially juicy ones?”

“Apparently three separate cults are interlocked in an unending bloody war, using Dellah as a mass battleground as they bring their twisted, warped desires to fruition,” Brax says drily.

“Not _again,_ ” Benny says, widening her eyes as she clasps a hand to her heart.

“Or, if others are to be believed, this is all some sort of mass-marketing publicity stunt.”

She goes back to her meal. “Honestly, I think I might prefer that to the actual truth.”

“That there’s another serial killer loose on this planet, so soon after the last one?” Brax sighs. “Yes, I can sympathize with that.”

They eat in silence for a few minutes. The meat is juicy and well-cooked, the vegetable sautéed to perfection. A far cry from the takeout Benny’s been subsisting off for a while.

“I’m worried about you,” says Brax.

“That’s startlingly direct of you.”

“You’re being startlingly reckless. Needs must.”

Benny chews on a carrot and stares at the painting opposite her, still visible behind Brax. “I have no idea what you mean.”

“I heard about your archaeology lecture,” he says. “ _Breakdown_ might be a better term for it. And a technician from the morgue called; told me a friend of mine had been in to visit with some very strange questions, and that he had some concerns. Concerns which I very much share.”

“V’Ne?” says Benny, and then shakes her head and mutters, “Oh, that _snitch..._ ”

“Yes, well,” Brax says. “To be fair to him, they were _very_ strange questions. I will, of course, respect your privacy, should you not wish to share, but...” He trails off, and raises an eyebrow invitingly.

Benny doesn’t look at him. Instead, she focuses on the face of the man that’s being torn apart in the painting behind him, and sees that he actually doesn’t look at all afraid, or pained, or even ecstatic – none of the expressions that you’d expect to be on the face of a naked man who’s being torn to shreds by a bunch of half-naked women. Instead, he almost looks... bored. Certainly _resigned._ As if this is the last in a long string of deeply unfortunate occurrences, and this is pretty much how he’d been expecting to go all along.

“I did try to check in with what the police were up to,” she says. “About the whole mass-murder thing.”

He hums softly to himself; says, “And?”

“And the answer is ‘next to nothing’. They’re severely understaffed and definitely underpaid. No wonder they took us on as consultants.”

“It’s a small planet. I’m not surprised. I doubt Dellah poured much time, funding, or attention into law enforcement on a place where it’s hardly likely to occur.”

“The events of the last month would beg heartily to differ,” she says. “And it’s negligent at best and downright _suspicious_ at worse _._ They didn’t say much but I get the impression that they’re barely doing anything at all to investigate this.”

“So you’re deciding to take the law into your own hands.” His tone is surprisingly neutral about it. She can’t tell if he approves or disapproves, and wonders if she’d care if he was slanting towards disapproval anyway. She thinks that maybe she would, in fact, just on principle.

“To borrow a colloquial phrase I heard a young friend of mine use once, taking the law into your own hands sounds pretty good once you start realizing how much the law _sucks,”_ she replies.

He grimaces. “Speaking as a... well, professional but unorthodox art collector – ”

“Filthy time-travelling thief, you mean,” Benny sing-songs, chugging apple juice like it’s the end of the world.

“...Don’t make me call you a grave-robber.” He clears his throat rather pointedly. “Speaking as a... someone who skirts neatly at the edge of the law, just _occasionally,_ and only when it’s _absolutely_ necessary – I’m inclined to agree.”

“So does this mean you’re on-board with me investigating the secret underground bunker full of blood sacrifices underneath the university campus?” She pauses. “Not that I need your permission, but. It’d be nice to have you helping me, I think.”

It’s very, very difficult to get this amount of horrified confusion all across Irving Braxiatel’s face. Benny doesn’t often get to see him making an expression like the one he is now, and it’s probably very wrong that she’s enjoying it as much as she is.

“ _Blood sacrifice?_ ” he says eventually. He’s practically speedrunning through the stages of grief, coasting right through denial, and sliding right into anger to get stuck on it. Anger’s a bit of a weird one to get stuck on; she’s honestly wondering when he’ll hit acceptance. “I – bunker?! _University campus?_ ”

“I’ve had a long, confusing week,” says Benny. “So, er. Want to see my notes?”

*

“The thing is, I _know_ that there’s somewhere the grates have to lead to,” says Benny, after she’s done explaining the whole blood-suction, hidden-grate thing to him. “And it’s definitely underground, and with the proximity to the university campus...”

“It seems like a fairly reasonable assumption that wherever it is, it’s accessible via the university itself,” says Braxiatel. “I see. And had your intention been to tell me about this from the beginning?”

She makes an _ehh_ noise and a so-so movement with her hand. “Honestly, it was kind of up in the air. I wasn’t sure. Just bask in the knowledge that I decided to tell you, eventually.”

“Currently basking,” he says, deadpan, and pauses for a long, pointed second. “All right. Basking complete.”

She leans back, folding her arms. “The real question is, can you find the place where all this blood runs into?”

“Do you really doubt my capabilities that much? I’m _wounded,_ ” he says, pressing a hand to his chest.

“No, I just think you’ll work better with a challenge,” she replies, to which he does laugh, faintly.

“Well, we’ll see.”

They finish dinner and adjourn to his office. It takes Braxiatel half an hour, in total, to track down the location of every single secret passage and hidden entrance in the university. This is achieved through an impressive combination of precision blackmail, keen eyes, razor-sharp logic, cutting-edge technology and just plain guesswork. And there are simultaneously a lot more and a whole lot fewer secret locations in the university than Benny would have expected.

“Well, we’re definitely going to have to report the one that goes directly under the staffroom,” Benny says after a moment or two of reviewing the finalized list.

“My vote is for keeping that one to ourselves for the moment, actually,” is Brax’s opinion. “But I don’t think that’s the one we should be focused on right now.”

“Uh, no, you’re right,” says Benny. “So. How about we talk about the gaping, 30-foot hole right underneath the theatre department? Because I’ll be honest, I did _not_ see that one coming.”

Because apparently that’s a thing that exists. _Thirty feet deep._ Right under their feet. Found only because of a very specific scan that had been done for completion’s sake, searching for a conspicuous lack of any trace readings at all – the sort of thing that would be the result of a particularly dedicated cloaking device keeping anything from being picked up. There are plenty of other locations in the university that seem mildly-to-moderately shady, but this is the only one that comes anywhere near close to being what they’re looking for.

“The only question is, how do we get in there?” Benny asks, leaning over Brax’s shoulder as he taps and swipes rapidly, frowning. “You know the theatre department better than I do. I mean, I’ve been in there once or twice, but I didn’t see any sort of doors or escape hatches leading to... _that._ ”

“No passages leading out,” says Brax, shaking his head. “Not that I can track down.”

“Can you bring up a schematic or map or something?” Benny says, something occurring to her.

He can and he does. Benny pores over it for a few minutes before announcing that they need to go to the main campus theatre. Immediately. She doesn’t quite know how to describe it. Something like intuition, but lying deeper within her.

There is a hole beneath the theatre. Under the floorboards of the stage itself, under the carpet of the crawlspace beneath. A very bemused-looking Brax helps her prise up an intricate series of planks and tarpaulin up, and when it’s all out of the way, they just stand and stare.

“Well,” says Benny, “this sure is a deep, dark pit.”

There _is_ light glimmering down at the bottom of it all, but it’s so faint as to be virtually nothing at all. There’s no sound coming up from below – no ominous clanking, no talking, nothing. Also, no way down. It just goes down for goddess-knows-how-deep.

“Is Clarence in town, do you know?” Benny asks, glancing up at Brax.

“I believe so,” says Brax, shooting her a calculating sideways look that lets her know he knows exactly what she’s thinking. “Wouldn’t a ladder be more convenient and immediate, though?”

“Clarence is quicker,” says Benny. “And faster, if I need to make a quick getaway. Let’s go find him, I want a good look down here.”

Clarence is indeed in town, and once they convince him to put some clothes on, Clarence is very willing to help out with the entire investigation. Actually, he was entirely willing even before he put some clothes on, but both Benny and Brax agreed that it was probably best if he didn’t terrorize the university with his sinfully attractive naked body.

“You want me to fly you down there?” Clarence asks, squinting down into the depths of the pit and tugging at the loose T-shirt that they’d found for him. “Both of you?”

“Ah,” says Brax, looking a bit uncomfortable. “Just Benny, I think. I’ll stay and monitor the situation from up here.”

Clarence sits back, and blinks. “Because it’s not a problem. I can almost definitely carry both of you at once if I need to.”

“Ooh, strong,” says Benny admiringly. “And helpful.”

But Brax is shaking his head. “No, I... no. I’m sorry, Benny. I think I’d be more helpful up here anyway. Not that I don’t trust you, Clarence, of course, but flying down into unknown pits for questionable reasons...”

“It’s more my area, yeah” Benny finishes.

She looks at him, and the dim light of the theatre turns his hair shadowy and gleaming-bright all at once. Then she blinks and he’s taking a step back, and pulling out his communicator with a frown.

“Okay,” she tells him, and looks to Clarence. “How are we doing this?” she wonders, and then Clarence wraps two very strong arms right around her waist, holding her close and tight, and his wings flex, and – “ _Oop_ , okay, we’re flying now – ” – he slips through into the hole and starts flying downwards in neat spiralling circles, taking it extremely slow.

“Is this all right?”

“Next time give a girl some warning,” Benny says. “But yes, it’s good. Fine.” She squints down at the distant light below. “Clarence, what do your angel eyes see?” 

“No people,” he says, surveying the ground from over her head. “Lots of machines. I also smell... ah, something?”

“That’d probably be all the blood they’re collecting down here. Did I not mention that bit?”

“You did not.”

“Oh, well, they’re collecting a lot of blood down here. God knows why.”

“He probably does, yes.”

“I forgot how much of an epistemological nightmare talking with you was,” Benny says, trying not to wriggle. “Okay, if there’s no people... yeah, this can’t possibly go terribly wrong, I’m sure. Take us down.”

Clarence adjusts his grip around her waist, tugging her up to a steadier position. “Are you sure?” he asks, sounding about as nervous as the closest thing to a literal angel could possibly sound.

“No,” she says. “But do it anyway.”

“Humans are strange, strange creatures,” he says, but obligingly narrows his wings so they start to glide down towards the floor of this overwhelmingly vast chamber.

The vast, _sticky_ chamber, Benny realizes as they touch down on the ground and Benny steps out of Clarence’s embrace and her boots catch and stick on the ground. There’s so much sticky red-tinted residue literally _everywhere,_ and with the smell and all the context clues in general, it’s not at all difficult to guess what it is. “You have _got_ to be kidding me.”

“One day,” says Clarence, with a look of faint distaste on his face, “I think I want to have an adventure with you that doesn’t involve a lot of death and gore. I’m not sure if that’s a reasonable thing to want? Is it?”

“Pretty reasonable,” Benny says, shuddering. She looks around, trying to get a hold on her surroundings. There’s so much machinery and strange equipment lining just about every wall of this room, and she can’t even begin to guess at its purpose. Tubes are running down from holes carved into the concrete ceiling, and although none of them currently are transporting anything at all, she’s going to go out on a limb and throw out a wild, wild guess that they usually carry blood. “How _old_ is this place? This is – I refuse to believe that all of this has been under St Oscar’s for as long as I’ve been here. That’s just ridiculous.”

Clarence is at one of the nearest pieces of machinery, a big chunky very-very-very-old-fashioned terminal that isn’t turning on no matter how he prods and pokes at it. “Maybe this room was always here, and it was just repurposed?” he suggests.

“That makes more sense,” says Benny. “See, this is why you’re here, Clarence. This is why I asked you to help; you’re the sensible one.”

“You’re very sensible too,” Clarence says, with a bright happy smile that seems very out of place, considering their surroundings. “But I thought you asked me to come because you needed someone to fly you down here?”

“Well, yes, that too,” Benny says. “But mostly it’s the sensible bit. Is that thing not turning on?”

“I believe there may be an external power source,” he says, and gestures to a set of sturdy-looking iron double doors off to one side of the chamber. “Probably through there.”

Benny goes over and rattles at them, but they’re locked. From the outside. “Can your angel eyes see through _that?_ And tell us what’s behind it?”

“...No. And you _know_ I can’t do that.”

“Worth a shot.” Benny takes a step back. “Go up and tell Brax what we’ve found, I suppose,” she says. “And try to bully him into coming and joining us, if you could. I kind of want his opinion on these terminals.”

“You’re just bossing me around because you enjoy the power trip, aren’t you?”

“Well, _yeah._ ”

“You’re extremely lucky we’re friends,” notes Clarence, somewhat ominously. That ominousness ends up being cancelled out by the wry little grin he shoots her. He fluffs his wings up and goes flapping upwards, spiralling out of the depths of the pit and towards the dim speck of light above them.

Benny turns back to the machinery and rolls up her sleeves. She’s going to figure out what’s going on here if it _kills_ her.

The largest machine has a glass sort of porthole in the side where several large jars are visible through. _Really_ large glass jars, more like tanks really; and they’re labelled with technical jargon that Benny doesn’t understand, but also with species names that she _does._ Killoran. Human. Pakhar. That last one also happens to be the one jar that’s half full with deep-red crimson liquid, slightly darker than a human’s blood would be but just as viscous. There’s two tubes in it – one leading in from above, one leading out of the machine.

Benny touches the tube with a finger, and follows it through the tangle of machinery. It weaves around and under several other large machines, but eventually she does find where it ends up. Buried dead in the ground, going downwards – even _deeper._

It’s about at this point that the door on the other side of the room slowly creaks open. And it’s also at about this point that Benny abruptly realizes that there’s really nowhere to run or hide in this place, and she’s on her knees, and that’s hardly the best place to be when there’s someone coming in behind her. She doesn’t even have time to think about grabbing something to use as a makeshift weapon before someone from behind her says, “I wouldn’t move if I were you.”

“Aw, shit,” Benny says. All she can do is freeze and hold her hands up in placating surrender and hope this isn’t how she dies. “Can I at least... you know, turn around?”

“Yes,” says the person. “Let me see your face.”

Benny very slowly rotates on the spot to face the newcomer, and the second she lays eyes on her she knows it’s her that’s behind all of this.

Something about the eyes. Or something about the soul.

Benny doesn’t even recognize this woman, that’s the strangest bit. She feels like she _should,_ that this sudden revelation of the face of the murderer should spark another sort of revelation where everything neatly falls into place and she realizes that many things that have seemed entirely inconsequential up until now are actually all interconnected.

But, no. This is just a woman. Nothing more, nothing less. Silvery grey skin; a series of raised nodes zigzagging up the side of her neck. A modest ponytail of light grey, almost white hair. Sharp, intelligent eyes. Benny doesn’t recognize her species, but she does recognize the brand of handgun that she’s reaching for right now – one of those old reconstruction ones, with actual bullets and recon-gunpowder and everything. Messy, hands-on, extremely painful.

“Now, before you shoot me for trespassing and all of _that_ particular, um, can of worms, I think you should know that I’ve had a really, _really_ involved week so far, and at least some of that is _definitely_ your fault – so really, it’d only be fair if you just put down the gun and discuss this calmly with me for a bit and maybe we can – ”

Here is what happens next.

The gun fires, and before she can even have a split-second chance to get annoyed about the fact that, since she’s about to be extremely and overwhelmingly dead, when Jason arrives on Dellah he’s _definitely_ going to steal her apartment and wreck the damn place, there is a soft _whumph_ sort of noise and feeling, and now she has a mouthful of feathers and there are arms around her.

She hears a yell of shock and surprise from the woman with the gun, which is probably no doubt because someone who is, to all intents and purposes, a literal _angel_ has just swooped in from out of nowhere to act as Benny’s personal bulletproof shield. Clarence has her in a loose embrace, gloriously bright wings fanning out around the two of them to act as cover. He’s so ridiculously tall when they’re standing right up next to each other like this, her head barely reaches his chest. His extremely muscle-y and well-defined chest. _Damn_ he’s fit. Although maybe this isn’t the time.

_Thank God for Clarence,_ she thinks, and then realizes the irony of that and laughs out loud.

“Are you all right?” Clarence mutters, patting vaguely at her head. “Did she hit you? You’re not meant to be laughing like that, I don’t think...”

“I’m fine,” she says, biting off her laughter, wraps her arms around him and squeezes briefly, trying to convey her gratitude. “Thank you. Also, you might want to be ready to do that again just in case she tries to shoot me. _Again._ ”

“Surely she wouldn’t be stupid enough to attempt to – ” Another shot rings out. Clarence’s wings tense, and there’s the sound of a bullet clattering to the ground. “Oh. I stand corrected, I suppose.”

“She didn’t even wait for you to _move,_ ” Benny says, faintly astounded by this and still mentally (and physically, come to think of it) vibrating from the immense stress of being shot at by a known killer. She waits for a moment, but no further gunfire is incoming. “Okay, I’m going to do something mildly stupid. Cover me?”

“I am,” Clarence points out, twitching his wings so they hang over both their heads just that little bit more.

“I meant more in the ‘watch my back while I take her gun away from her’ sense, Clarence.”

“Oh, I see. That does seem a bit more than ‘mildly stupid’, but I’ll do my best.”

“Cheers,” she says, and slips out from under the loop of his arm, ducking under the feathery sweep of his wings. The silver-skinned woman’s eyes are wide and she’s still got the gun levelled right at Benny. She fires again, and then once more, but the first shot goes wild and the second shot is blocked by her slightly overprotective angel friend, and by the time Benny gets right up next to her and wrenches the old-fashioned handgun out of her hands, she’s just about trembling with fear and confusion.

“What the hell _are_ you?” she mutters feverishly.

“Oh,” says Benny. She considers the handgun in her hands, and decides to level it at the woman, because she doesn’t have anything else to do with it and she might as well use it for intimidation points, even if she doesn’t really feel like doing anything with it. “That’s a bit complicated, actually. See, there’s this group of, er, well – _people,_ I suppose, called the People, and Clarence here used to be a ship. A sentient sort of ship, except, again, it’s a bit more complicated than that. But then God – ”

“Not the _angel,_ ” hisses the woman. “I know what he is. What the hell are _you?_ ”

Clarence and Benny exchange a look of mutual complete confusion.

“She’s a professor of archaeology at the local university?” volunteers Clarence. “I understand that, in the big scheme of things, those are fairly rare. Actually, approximately zero point zero-zero-zero-zero-zero – ” He clears his throat. “ – well, it recurs for a while, and then six – percent of the general universal population are in the field, and less than that are _professors,_ so I can understand the confusion.”

“Shoot me,” says the woman to Benny. Her eyes are widening in something like ecstasy. Something like awe. Something like... Benny doesn’t like this. “Oh, look at you – you’re _perfect._ You need to end me now. I won’t have it _any_ other way.”

Clarence tries to exchange another look of mutual complete confusion with Benny, but she’s not looking at him any more and she only catches the vaguest snatch of the movement on her peripheral vision. She’s staring at the woman, and her hands are inexplicably shaking.

Any trace of levity has fallen away from her mind completely, and all she can hear is blood. Rushing in her ears, vibrating through her skin. Is it her blood? Hard to tell. It doesn’t _sound_ like her blood. Does her blood have a specific sound? She’s never thought about that before. She supposes it must do.

“You want me,” she says, and forcing the words out feels like pushing through honey. Or congealed liquid. Or blood. Why is there so much blood? “To. Kill you?”

“We all die eventually,” she says, the words perfectly clear over the roar. “Me sooner than most. I’d rather it be you than anyone else.”

It feels like she should know the answer to the question that’s currently bouncing around her mind like an endless echo in an enclosed chamber, but she asks it anyway. “Why _me?_ ”

“You’re far enough gone,” she says, and stares at Benny with silvery, intense eyes – unblinking. “Hadn’t you realized?”

“Look, I haven’t gone anywhere,” says Benny, or tries to say, but it just sticks in her throat. She barely even registers the fact that she’s lowering the gun.

“Benny, what are you doing?” says Clarence.

She doesn’t speak, at first. She doesn’t know if she _can_ speak.

But then she does, and although she knows exactly what she’s asking and why she’s asking it, she’s almost afraid of herself even so.

Although maybe she’s more afraid of what she’s going to hear.

*

“Everything all right?” says Braxiatel, when Clarence ends up flying Benny to the top in lieu of attempting to puzzle out whatever strange tunnel system the killer had used to get in and out. “I took the liberty of calling law enforcement when I heard the gunshots.”

“Neither of us are injured,” says Clarence.

Benny doesn’t miss the note of wariness in his voice – she just chooses to ignore it.

“Fine,” she says, with a shrug. “Just some sort of mad scientist with a god complex. Knocked her out with a gun, tied her to her own machines. Definitely killed all those Pakhar people, probably killed a few more that nobody ever knew about. Kept raving about me being ‘the one’ or something – flattering, but I don’t really go for the psychopathic killer type. That’s about it.”

“Ah, I see,” says Brax. His voice is very even and very calm. “And why was she doing this all – did she say?”

She breathes in, breathes out. Clarence doesn’t say anything, but then again he has no particular loyalty to Brax, and she _had_ asked him, so...

“No,” she says. “Not a word.”

And Clarence, true to his word, doesn’t say a thing to contradict this blatant, blatant lie.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're sitting here wondering about timelines, I'm here to tell you this: where sepelio is concerned, there isn't one. I've given up on worrying about timelines and making sense of things. There are far more important things to worry about.


	3. saignant

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for being so patient and so wonderfully supportive about whatever the hell this is supposed to be. 
> 
> Having posted this chapter; I shall now go sleep for a full week. Goodbye!

*

_If everyone was cognizant of their purpose on earth, we would only need weapons for hunting and nothing else._ \- Gift Gugu Mona

*

“Damn, bitch, you live like this?” is the first thing Jason says upon invading her home and privacy unexpectedly at the extremely reasonable hour of eleven o’clock at night.

Benny raises her head off her diary, where she’s apparently been half-dozing for the last goddess-knows-how long. The paper sticks to her face briefly until she tears it off. It leaves the faintest of impressions on her face. “Ugh – I thought you weren’t getting in until eight tomorrow.”

“I got in at eight in the morning _yesterday,_ ” Jason says. “Which you’d know if you checked the schedule. You said you’d pick me up from the spaceport.”

She pushes her chair back and sits up, stretching. She winces as every bone in her body competes with each other to make the loudest and most painful popping noises known to galactic civilisation. “I agreed to _nothing_ of the sort.”

“All right, so maybe you didn’t,” Jason allows reluctantly. “But you didn’t even _try_ to contact me. Me. Your only husband. The love of your life, who came all this way to see you and only you.”

“Okay, first of all – so maybe I forgot about you showing up. Sue me, I’ve been busy. Second of all, ex-husband, third of all, _the love of my what now? –_ fourth of all, if you’ve been here for an entire day, why are you picking _now,_ two hours away from midnight, to burst into my home and announce your presence – ”

“My _glorious_ presence – ”

“Your _abysmal_ presence to me. I’m _busy,_ Jason Kane.”

“I can see that,” says Jason dryly. “I can see that from the way that you fell asleep on top of all of this extremely important work that you’re doing.”

“I’m busy and it’s also extremely late.” She blinks up at him, and tries to rub the gritty feeling from her eyes. “Seriously. Why now?”

“Felt like waking you up,” he says with a shrug.

“Bastard,” Benny growls, snatching up the closest textbook to throw at him.

He dodges with a neat sidestep, and bends down to pick it up. He reads the title, sees that it’s archaeology-related, and drops it down on the nearest side-table. “Good to see you too. What is this all even about?”

“If I tell you, you’ll get very disappointed in me,” Benny says.

“And you care about disappointing me since... when?”

“Good point. I’m researching the murder case.”

“I’m extremely disappointed in you.”

“I don’t care that you’re disappointed in me,” says Benny with no small amount of glee.

There’s a brief lull in the conversation as Wolsey chooses this very moment to peer around the corner of the door and meow plaintively at Jason, loudly bemoaning a lack of affection and attention and cuddles, and complaining at length about the absolute injustice of being shoved inelegantly off his loving mother’s desk multiple times in the space of mere minutes. Or that’s what Benny assumes he’s talking about. Her cat tends to get chatty and huffy when she’s hardcore-focusing on a project.

“Jason, entertain my darling boy,” she orders, picking up a pen from the mug where most of her good writing implements are currently clustered.

Jason rolls his eyes but kneels down to give Wolsey the cuddles and behind-the-ear scratches that he so desperately craves. “Benny, at least tell me – ”

“Sh! No talk. Must write.” Benny tears off the pen cap with her teeth and starts scribbling. She’s several days behind on her diary and has quite a few things that she’d like to commit to paper in the unlikely event of the digital versions of it becoming compromised or corrupted. _Important_ things.

“Why are you still here?” she asks after a few minutes, looking up from her fifth consecutive diary-entry page of the night.

Jason is now holding Wolsey, who is purring furiously, apparently delighted that he’s finally getting some attention. “You,” he says, “are going to bed.”

“I am _not._ I’m staying right here. You, on the other hand, are getting the hell out of my apartment.”

“Don’t make me carry you, Benny.”

She points her pen at him warningly. “Don’t make me carry _you._ You know I can do it.”

“I do, and it’s _extremely_ hot. But this isn’t about your astoundingly jacked body or your very attractive muscles, this is about you getting some rest.” He weighs Wolsey considerately, and then looks pointedly around the room. “Because I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but your apartment currently looks like ground-zero for a nuclear explosion at Dellah’s biggest wild conspiracy-theorist’s convention of the century.”

Benny sits in silence, and follows his gaze, taking in what he’s seeing. Photos of bloody crime scenes taped roughly to the walls, scribbled sheets of half-torn notes discarded and flung wildly all over the ground. There’s red string. She can’t even remember where she got the red string _from_ , let alone actually putting it up.

“...Maybe I do need a break,” she says. “Just a small one, mind.”

After a bit of coaxing on Jason’s part, they venture into her bedroom, Jason still semi-reluctantly carrying Wolsey. Benny sighs, then toes off her shoes and shrugs off her jacket. Might as well be comfortable if this is happening.

“We could have sex,” says Jason thoughtfully as he looks around the room. It’s not a demand or a request or anything really, other than a passing thought. He glances at her, apparently checking how amenable she is to this idea.

“Not tonight,” says Benny after a second of genuine consideration. Getting down and dirty is kind of the furthest thing from her mind right now. “Next time, maybe. For now, let’s just...”

“Cuddle?” Jason offers, placing Wolsey back down onto the ground and letting him scamper off to hide under the bed.

“Cuddle,” Benny agrees, and throws back the covers, sliding underneath them with a little sigh. “Get in here.”

“Why are you fully clothed, you _monster,_ ” Jason grumbles, but slides in next to her. Also fully clothed, the filthy hypocrite.

She wraps an arm around his waist and he encircles her shoulder and draws her close to him. He smells like shitty hotel shampoo and that very particular low-class transit smell that takes a good couple of weeks to get off properly. She’s aware that she probably doesn’t smell all that much better, because she’s pretty sure she hasn’t had a shower in days, even though it’s been hard to keep track recently. He’s warm and strangely soft and solid and _real._ She closes her eyes and burrows into his chest.

“You stink,” he says into her hair.

“You _suck,_ ” she retorts.

“And yet, you haven’t kicked me out of your apartment.”

“Don’t give me ideas.” Despite this, she doesn’t move an inch. They stay there, half-curled into each other for what feels like both entirely too long and not long enough. Eventually, Jason shifts to tug the blankets tighter over them both.

“So,” he says. “Remember how last week I asked you not to get in trouble?”

Benny mumbles something exhausted and angry into Jason’s shirt that even she can’t quite interpret the meaning of. “Can we not do pillow talk right now? I just want to lie here.”

“Is it really considered pillow talk if we haven’t had sex preceding it?”

“Don’t get philosophical about what may or may not be our pillow talk.”

“And don’t try to avoid the conversation. Remember when I told you not to get into trouble? And you went ‘all right, Jason, I won’t get into trouble’, and then promptly got involved in a murder cult investigation?”

“Okay, first of all, I – ” Benny pauses abruptly, pulling herself back from the edge of what promises to be a really great and immensely satisfying tirade. “Wait, _what_ cult? Where?”

“Three of them,” Jason says. “Locked in deadly battle for planet-wide supremacy.”

“Oh, _goddess damn everything to a million types of hell and back._ ” Benny ducks her head under the covers. “Those fucking news articles. I should’ve known you’d get your hands on those.”

Jason lets out a light laugh. “Yeah, don’t worry. It all seemed pretty implausible to me. Especially since, according to one of them, you’ve recently become one of the cult leaders.”

“I wish people would let me know about these things in advance,” says Benny. “I need to get my ominous dark robes properly washed and ironed, I can’t do that on short notice.”

“How inconsiderate of them all,” Jason agrees. “But, like, I managed to read in between the lines. And into some of the less ridiculous articles. I think I’ve got a pretty good grasp on what happened. Someone was stringing people up and draining their blood into some sort of... jeez, it sound silly when I put it like this, but... underground secret base? And you and that angel friend of yours stopped the woman who was doing it, with Brax’s help?”

“No, that’s – ” One more, Benny stops. “Actually, yes. That’s pretty much exactly what happened. How did you know that? I refuse to believe any of those news sites actually managed to get any of it _right._ ”

“You’d be surprised. There was this whole article on InCrimiNet about it – lots of pictures of that bloodbank laboratory place, a bunch of admittedly very attractive shots of you looking dishevelled and slightly shellshocked – ”

“What?” Benny frowns, and shifts to look at him properly. “There weren’t any recording devices after I got out of there. And I’m about eighty percent sure they didn’t let any reporters at all onto the scene. Not even after it got cleared.”

“Twenty-percent margin of error,” he points out, then, “and just because you didn’t see them doesn’t mean they weren’t there, right?” But now his frown matches her. “It was a _really_ detailed article, though...”

Benny wants to keep on lying here with him like this. But now she’s overcome with an intense, overwhelming desire to find out what the actual hell is going on. These two desires war within her for a long, long moment until she realizes that she can just get Jason to do it for her.

She relays this to him and tells him to show her the article, and he replies, “Can’t we just keep cuddling and deal with this tomorrow?”

“Listen, you were the one that brought it up. You think I’m just going to let it drop after you mentioned a weirdly detailed article? With attractive candid snapshots of me, to boot?”

Jason grunts, and then flails about wildly in the darkness. “Fine. Gimme your datapad.”

“Get it yourself,” Benny retorts, rolling over onto him so he stops flailing around wildly. “Mm... think it’s on the floor. Plugged in, hopefully. Hand it over, I’ll unlock it.”

Jason does so, with some effort because she hasn’t moved from off of him, and when she’s pressed her hand to the sensor, he sets about searching up the article in question. “Here we go. InCrimiNet, top article, looks like – Jesus, that’s a lot of views. Looks like they’ve been getting a lot of traffic lately.”

“It’s so _boring_ here on Dellah; I can’t imagine why.” Benny scoots up so the back of her head’s resting on the headboard, and peers over Jason’s shoulder. “ _Everything They Don’t Want You To Know About Dellah’s Disturbing Death Rates_ , by Maria V Flenn. You have _got_ to be kidding me.” She reaches out, scrolling down the page at rapid speed. “This – this is bullshit. _What?_ ”

“ _Right?_ ” Jason says. “I mean, I know I was getting on your case about the whole conspiracy-themed room decor, but this is something _else._ ”

“And that’s putting it lightly.” Benny grabs the pad and pulls it over. She stares at the screen for a good few seconds before pushing herself bolt upright. “I need to talk to Brax.”

“You need to talk to _who now_ ,” goes Jason, pulling her back down.

“Braxiatel,” says Benny. She tries to sit up again but Jason tugs her insistently back down to the mattress and she gives it up as a lost cause. “I’m talking about Irving Braxiatel – you know, my best friend...? – wait, have you two even met?”

“Uhh,” says Jason, and his face scrunches up a bit as he thinks about this. “Oh, hang on. Didn’t you invite him to our wedding? Tall bloke, dark hair, looks like he’s constantly on the verge of plotting and executing an Arsene Lupin-style museum heist?”

“That’s the one,” Benny says. “Although probably don’t mention the whole wedding thing to him. I’m pretty sure he hasn’t actually been to it yet, and, you know.”

“Oh. Right.” Jason frowns. “Bloody time travellers.”

“Yep. Don’t want to spoil the fun for him. Or let him know any details about the cricket match, because you _know_ he’ll retroactively rig it in his favour, given half the chance.”

“Fair enough. Wait – best friend? What? I thought your partner was supposed to be your best friend,” Jason objects, a hint of that whiny affrontedness in his voice.

“You’re not my husband anymore. If we were ever _best friends,_ that status got revoked years ago.”

“Fine, then – I thought the _Doctor_ was your best friend. Last time I saw you two, you were – you were, like, attached at the hip. Swanning around the universe, saving lives, all that jazz. Did you _tell_ him you were replacing him, or-?”

“No, but he probably should’ve seen it coming anyway,” Benny says. “Brax listens to me rant about extremely specific topics that only I care about, and he makes fancy dinners for me. Plus, he actually hugs me.” She squints balefully at the ceiling. “Granted, he’s terrible at hugging. But the Doctor barely _ever_ hugged me. So, points for effort.”

“ _I_ hug you,” mutters Jason unhappily.

“Anyway, friendship ended with the Doctor – Brax is now my best friend.” Benny looks over at Jason. “And he has a lot of pull in places you probably wouldn’t expect him to have. So giving him a visit can’t do any harm.”

“Fine,” Jason grunts. “We’ll talk to your terrible best friend. But _tomorrow._ Right now, you’re going to bed, because I swear you haven’t slept for _days –_ ”

“He’s not terrible.” Benny elbows him. “Don’t be mean. Or I won’t invite you to dinner next time he cooks.”

“It can’t be _that_ good of a dinner.”

“It absolutely can, and if you stop being a jerk person, you’ll get to find out.”

“Fine,” Jason agrees, and slings an arm over her. “But not tonight.”

“I could just call him – ”

“Whoa, what’s that?” Jason grabs the datapad and tosses it across the room. “Datapad’s gone. Stop elbowing me, I threw it onto a pile of laundry, it’s _fine_ but you aren’t touching it. Not until tomorrow. Go the fuck to sleep.”

“Hm. You’re very insistent on me getting some rest tonight,” Benny says.

“Because I care about you. Is that so hard to believe?”

There’s a soft _thump,_ and then a soft, warm weight makes itself known just above the vicinity of Benny’s stomach.

“See,” says Jason. “The cat’s here. Now we legally can’t move.”

“I hate that you’re right,” Benny sighs, and burrows into the covers, careful not to shift Wolsey from where he’s settled himself. “Fine. Sleep now, uncomfortable conversations later, extremely good dinner party even later than that.”

“I’m holding you to all three of these things. Now, _go to sleep._ ”

*

“Maria Flenn?” Brax says, adjusting his reading glasses as he peers down at a printout of the article. “No, I can’t say I have – not beyond her being the author of some of the more, ah, outlandish news reports...”

“Outlandish is a word for it; but have you _seen_ the amount of detail that’s in it?” Benny pushes the printout closer to him. “You know what it’s like. You went down there, you –”

“I did not,” Brax says.

“Oh.” Benny frowns. “Oh, I guess you didn’t. But _still_. You probably know already just how _detailed_ this is, and the details of everything in this article... it’s like first-hand knowledge.”

“Perhaps it was,” Braxiatel says, glancing down at it. He frowns. “I have, as I mentioned previously, been keeping an eye out on the media surrounding these two incidents, among others,” he says. “But you clearly haven’t, because this wouldn’t be nearly as surprising to you as it is. Ms Flenn has been keeping up a steady stream of these ‘exposé articles’ since Mr Eddison Bright attempted to bury you, over a month ago. She seems to have a vendetta against you for some strange reason, as you... can probably tell.”

“I don’t even _know_ her,” says Benny, astounded and quite a bit affronted. “Seriously. Why didn’t _anyone_ tell me about this stuff?”

“I think most people thought you already knew,” Jason offers. He’s hovering near the door, looking uncomfortable at being in such a polished and clean academic study.

“Well, I didn’t,” Benny huffs, crossing her arms and looking away. “I’ve had bigger things on my mind.”

“Bigger things, like getting involved in murder investigations that don’t necessarily concern you?” he says, and glances up to the doorway. “And I presume this is your ex-husband.”

“Ex – ” Benny begins to correct, out of sheer habit, and then says, “Oh. Yes, this is Jason. I don’t think you’ve met...?”

“Jason Kane,” says Jason, with a little charming grin – good first impressions are everything, apparently.

“Irving Braxiatel. Any friend of Benny’s, etcetera, etcetera...” He waves a hand. “My apologies, I’m rather exhausted. It’s a pleasure to meet you. I hear you’ve been trying to talk Benny out of her usual – my consolations.”

“If by ‘usual’ you mean ‘her usual stupid reckless archaeology shenanigans’... yes! I have! Thank you!” He looks inordinately pleased to have found an ally here.

“Stop being civil to each other and stop ganging up on me,” Benny says, and takes the opportunity to survey Brax. He looks... yeah, he looks tired. Tired and drawn in a way that’s entirely unusual for him. He’s paler than usual and the faintest of rings stand out under his eyes. Now it’s her turn to be worried about him, because it looks like he’s been running himself ragged for days on end, or like he’s been starving himself. Although she can’t imagine _why._ “Hey – Brax – ”

“I’m fine,” he interrupts gently before she can get any further, which is good, because she has next to no idea as to what she was actually going to say. “Just a touch under the weather.”

She gives him a look, and then grudgingly nods. “All right. Well, the reason we came here was to ask you if there’s any way you might be able to track down this Flenn lady.”

“You want to have a quiet word with her,” Brax guesses.

“A loud one,” Jason says, “knowing Benny. And possibly some fists too. And knives? Do you still have that knife I gave you for your birthday?”

“...You’re making fun of me, but you’re not wrong,” Benny says reluctantly. “And, yes. I do. Somewhere. That’s not the point. Listen, I can handle mean-spirited comments and people disliking me. I do that on a daily basis, even. A little kick to my ego isn’t the end of the world, even if I hate it and kind of want to rip her stupid fingers off. But this is edging into the ‘serious slander’ territory, and we all know how quickly that sort of thing can escalate. Better to nip it in the bud, right?”

“I absolutely agree,” Brax says. “And I did in fact look into her background when she first began to appear on my radar. But she happens to be a very private person.”

“Private enough that you can’t find anything on her?”

“Private enough for that, yes.”

“Damn.” She frowns. “Okay, before we get all side-tracked by this, there was one more thing I wanted to ask. And, ah – feel free to give me a disapproving look and a slow shake of the head if it’s completely out of line for me to bring up. Any chance of dinner another one of these nights? Jason included, that is.”

Something on Brax’s face brightens, and then almost immediately dims. What that _something_ is, it’s impossible to tell “I... will have to see. Not that I wouldn’t usually be delighted,” he adds swiftly. “There just happens to be rather a lot on my plate, as things stand.”

“No pressure,” says Benny, and reaches out to pat his hand. “Just thought it’d be a nice change of pace. And a nice chance to show off,” she adds, raising her eyebrows pointedly in Jason’s direction, “seeing how Mr Kane here seems to doubt your cooking skills.”

“ _Does_ he now,” says Brax, another spark of animation coming back to him for a split-second or two. “Well. We both know I _do_ love a challenge...”

“And so do I,” says Benny. “Which is why I’m going to go and find this Maria Flenn person, and I’m going to do it _today._ ”

“Today?” Jason says. “Huh. Ambitious.”

“...This week,” Benny amends, and then amends again: “No, wait, three days. This planet isn’t all that big, she’s bound to be somewhere around here. Somewhere _close,_ seeing how she’s managing to get to all these close-by crime hotspots. I have a list of contacts somewhere, maybe – I’ll need to go to my classroom. All right, see you later,” she tells Brax – who smiles at her and then returns to his paperwork, and then, to Jason, “Don’t break into my apartment ever again or I’ll set my cat against you. Find some other place to stay.”

“That sounds like a challenge.”

“Mm... no. No, it doesn’t.”

Jason huffs. “Oh, come _on._ So when you and Brax have challenges it’s a good thing, but as soon as I express that I want to – ”

“ – break and enter into my house and home – ”

“ – it’s suddenly _illegal,_ outlawed! Terrible idea, Jason, go die on the streets!”

“Your challenge,” says Benny, and pushes open the door, “is to find an apartment. Or an empty skip bin, I’m not picky. Last night was nice, but I refuse to share a living space with you for any extended period of time. I haven’t forgotten our honeymoon, Jason Kane.” 

*

Benny heads into her usual lecture hall to pick up her contact list, as well as some other bits and bobs she just _knows_ she’s left behind – and there is a young man with a long grey scarf waiting for her inside. She is scowling furiously.

“Good morning, Shatana,” Benny sighs, heading right for her desk and refusing to make eye contact with her current most persistent student. “Is it too much to hope for that you’re here to ask for mock exam question clarification?”

“You didn’t make a mock exam,” Shanata says. Her arms are crossed.

“Oh, that’s right; so I didn’t.” Benny obtains her diary, presses a quick relieved kiss to its battered cover, and goes on the hunt for a data drive that she just _knows_ is lying around here somewhere. “Hm – hey, have you seen a data drive in this room? I could’ve sworn I left it in the lecture hall, it’s shaped like a very, _very_ good cat – ”

“You _said_ you’d keep me updated!”

“I told you no such thing. You begged me to ‘keep you in the loop’, and I made a bunch of vague noises and redirected the conversation and you _assumed_ that meant that I’d keep you updated, but surprise!” She produces the cat-shaped data drive from underneath a pile of ungraded student papers with a flourish. “‘Twas a clever ruse! Performed in order to keep you, my dear young padawan, out of trouble! You are a kid, and should not have to deal with my blood-drenched shenanigans. Be _glad_ I kept you out of the loop.”

“I’m twenty-one,” mutters Shanata.

“And therefore a literal baby. Absolute child.” The teasing grin that’s been spreading across Benny’s face up until now drops away suddenly, and she turns to look at Shanata. “Listen, I know how this sounds, trust me, I do – but you don’t want to be involved. It probably seems like some sort of thrilling noir adventure from where you’re standing, but it’s... very not fun from my point of view.” She squints at Shanata. “Hang on, how long have you been waiting here? There’s no way you could’ve known I was coming. Were you just hanging out in my classroom on the off-chance that you’d be able to badger me about... this?”

“Only about an hour, and yes. I saw another news article about the blood-harvesting factory underneath the theatre department and instantly got overcome with incandescent rage. So I stormed over here in a righteous fury, ready to give you a piece of my mind about ghosting me when things were just getting _really_ interesting.”

“I can’t _ghost you._ You’re my student.” Benny sighs. “Also, the articles are eighty percent bullshit, I’m not a cult leader, and I’m not involved anymore.”

“I _know._ I guessed. You’re not put-together enough to be a cult leader,” Shanata replies. Blinks. “Hang on, you’re not involved anymore?”

“My hus – my _ex-_ husband and my best friend have ganged up together and sworn me to solemn non-involvement in any and all further murder investigations,” Benny tells her. “At least until I see a therapist, anyway. To which I laughed and said, _like that’s ever going to happen,_ and then Jason also laughed and pointed at me and said, _exactly._ So I think I kind of played myself there.”

“I literally don’t know how to react to that,” Shanata admits. “Like, _gods,_ your life sounds so ridiculously wild. What sort of life choices do I have to make in order to have my husband and my best friend stage an intervention about _having to stop investigating murder?_ ”

“The wrong ones,” says Benny darkly, and gathers up all her belongings in her arms before heading out the door.

Shanata follows, unrelenting. “Seriously. Any tips, hints, tricks, advice, people I need to talk to – I want to live an interesting life. You’re the most interesting person I know.”

Benny lets out a huff of a sigh. “Advice? Okay, here’s some. If a man with questionable fashion choices and a model train collection stored away somewhere asks you to function as a moral compass because he’s afraid he’s lost his own...”

“Yeah?”

“Tell him to piss off. Absolutely not worth it. I love him dearly, but he may or may not be directly responsible for literally everything that happened after I got into that police box of his.”

Shanata blinks, nonplussed, but doesn’t stop following her. “I’m sensing some unresolved issues here.”

“Strange, that,” deadpans Benny, and then, “Oi, give that back!”

Because Shanata has now stolen the topmost notebook from Benny’s stack of belongings. The one that she’s brought along with her because it has all of her condensed research and notes and it’s _important_ and oh would you look at that, she’s already paging carelessly through it.

“Instant D-minus,” Benny says, trying to snatch it back from Shanata and failing miserably. “Times a million. You have failed my class an infinite amount of times in the space of the last ten seconds.”

“I fear no gods nor university lecturers,” she declares. “I’m here on a scholarship. You can’t get rid of me.”

“ _Fucking scholarship students._ ” Benny gives up on trying to retrieve the notebook. “Fine. Hope you enjoy my crazed murder ramblings.”

“Oh, I will.” Shanata, now no longer having to dodge Benny’s grasping hands, walks behind at a comfortable several-metres-away distance, reading with occasional commentary that Benny ignores, because – nope. Not engaging. She ignores it all the way until –

“Maria Flenn? Hey, I know her,” Shanata exclaims. “She’s my partner’s roommate.”

“Wha – ” Benny is immediately paying about a hundred times more attention that she was half a second ago. “Wait. _Really?_ So you know where she lives? You could get me in contact with her?”

“Uh, well, I don’t know,” Shanata says, lowering the datapad. “From the way you were talking a minute ago, you kind of sounded like you wanted to dump her on the nearest desert moon without any supplies or hope of rescue, and I don’t think that’s the sort of thing that – wait, no, who am I kidding; this lady sounds like a bitch. I can _absolutely_ get you in contact with her.”

“Shanata, you are my _favorite_ student and an absolute bloody genius, and don’t let anyone ever tell you other – ”

“ _If_ you let me come with you,” Shanata says with a dangerous little glint in her eye.

“Shanata, why must you be a reckless blackmailing fool.”

“Got nothing better to do with my life. And you’re not going to find her unless you let me tag along, so... you in or not?”

_Well, it’s just some jerk of a reporter,_ Benny thinks. This is literally the most non-threatening murder-related expedition she’s been on in the last month or so. If one of her students is going to be tagging along on with her on anything, this seems like the best time to do it. So, with that in mind... “Do _not_ take my acceptance as a sign that I’m the sort of person who just caves into any demands, given enough pressure.”

“Of course not,” Shanata nods, pumping her fist in the air in silent victory.

“Because I’m not that sort of person.”

“Totally not,” she agrees.

“ _Absolutely_ not.”

“Yep. Yep. Got that, don’t worry, wouldn’t dream of thinking anything otherwise, your non-existent secret is safe with me. So, do you want to do this now, or...?”

Benny considers pressing the (slightly ridiculous) issue, but dismisses it as a lost cause. “I – okay. Give me half an hour, because I need to drop all of this stuff back at my place. But right after that, can you meet me, er...”

“25 Aston Mercer Drive; it’s the big building with the tasteless mural of all those people kissing over a battlefield of wrecked and ruined Daleks,” Shanata supplies. “I’ll meet you out front, then we can go up to the room together.”

“Sounds good,” Benny says. “See you then.”

*

_aren’t you listening – aren’t you paying attention – can’t you hear us?_

_don’t you crave crave crave for the hunt for the blood for the thrill of the chase – aren’t you ready to feed us?_

_why aren’t you responding_

_aren’t you hungry anymore?_

_aren’t you hungry_

_aren’t you -_

*

Shanata is indeed there waiting in front of 25 Aston Mercer Drive when Benny arrives there a short while later. She grins at Benny and goes loping off towards the stairs without even pausing for conversation. Benny has to speedwalk to catch up. “Eager to get involved in my mess of a life, aren’t you?”

“Well, yeah,” is the shameless reply. “But also, I called ahead to see if Maria was at the apartment, and hearing his voice reminded me I get to see Mersi again when we get there. So I’m actually equally excited about that. It’s a bit of an excitement smorgasbord, if you will.”

“Aw,” says Benny, lightly amused, and then, “wait, so _is_ she home?”

“Maria? Um. Not _exactly..._ ”

Benny stops in her tracks. “Wait, then what am I here for?”

“She _is_ coming back in, like, a few minutes!” Shanata is quick to assure her, turning back around. “Seriously, I double-checked it all – apparently she’s out doing reporter-y stuff, but she’s gonna be back when we’re still there. Hopefully.”

“Good choice of words. You really aren’t inspiring hope.”

Shanata huffs and starts walking again and after a second, so does Benny. “Look, I’m doing my best here. I’m not _you._ Plans don’t just magically fall into place around me. I have to deal with last-minute cancellations and people not turning up where they should.”

“That’s not – ” Benny sighs. “Whatever. Just keep going.”

Third floor, apartment number 26. Shanata fumbles for her keys, and then unlocks it, with a vague shout of, “I’m here!”

“Just finishing up!” comes the reply from further within.

It’s a cosy-looking little apartment – the decor’s only _slightly_ tasteless and just a tad bit bland. There is one set of shoes near the door, and Shanata kicks off her own as she walks in. Benny pauses, and then shrugs before following suit – Shanata closing and locking the door behind them.

She leads the way down a short hallway into what seems to be the main living space, where a taller young man with double-ridged pointed ears and a short shock of bright scarlet hair – Mersi, presumably – is sitting, humming to himself as he taps away at a flashing pad of numbers and symbols that Benny doesn’t recognize.

Shanata falls onto the couch next to him, and throws an arm around his shoulders, curling into his side. He finishes whatever he’s doing, pushes the keypad to one side, and leans over to plant a kiss on her cheek and then her lips, in quick succession.

Shanata hums and kisses back briefly, before drawing back and gestures vaguely over at Benny. “Okay, so this is – ”

“The hot professor you talked about?” interrupts Mersi.

Two things happen at once: Benny’s eyebrows raise to unprecedented heights, and Shanata’s cheeks darken abruptly as she starts babbling something panicked and borderline incoherent that’s mostly made up of excuses, apologies, and denials.

It’s really rather endearing in an extremely weird ‘ _I guess another one of my students has a crush on me_ ’ sort of way, and Benny has to fight back laughter. Because it would seem downright cruel, especially considering how embarrassed and mildly pathetic Shanata currently looks.

“It’s fine,” she says. “It’s fine, you’re – Mersi, you are an _exceptionally_ cruel person, stop bullying my student. But it’s fine. Look, I’ll pretend to forget about it if you do too?”

“Please do that,” Shanata says. “I’ll even pay for a memorywipe for all of us. I don’t want to think about this ever again.”

“Noted and appreciated. How about we just talk about something else instead of going to all that trouble?”

“That works too, yeah.”

Maria Flenn still isn’t back yet, so they all sit down in the living room and Benny introduces herself properly, and receives an introduction from Mersi, in return. He apparently designs self-evolving security systems, which explains all the abstract colors and flashing. And when he’s not doing this, he bakes. A _lot._ Somewhat obsessively, if the sheer amount of snacks that he goes to fetch for them is anything to go by.

“You picked a good one,” Benny tells Shanata, after trying a single chocolate eclair and summarily falling in love.

“I _know_ ,” Shanata says, beaming as she finishes up the strawberry mousse that Mersi apparently makes just for her. “I know I did.”

“Life lesson number one,” Benny says. “If you can’t cook to save your life, get extremely close with someone who _can._ And then just bother them endlessly until they cook for you. And hey, look at you! – succeeded at step one. Everything from here’s just easy sailing.”

“You’ve got your own, huh?” Shanata holds her hand up for a fistbump, which Benny cheerfully returns. “

“Yes, well,” says Benny, “in my case, I swore off romance completely about two years ago – due to an incident I will not speak about because you’re still my student and I _do_ have some boundaries – so at this point I’m basically just in a committed relationship with my coworker’s insanely talented cooking skills. I’m more like a parasite, really.”

“Fair,” allows Shanata, licking her spoon clean. “I mean, who needs romance with food this good?”

“I heard that,” Mersi says, re-entering the room. “And if romance is out of the question, the food’s gone too.”

Shanata sticks her tongue out, and then licks some chocolate from her upper lip. “I was joking. _Obviously._ I appreciate you for more than your cooking and you know it.”

A jingling of keys, some distant muttering, and then the door opens.

“Oh, here we go,” Mersi says, turning away from Shanata. “Professor Summerfield – uh, Benny – this is – ”

“Maria Flenn,” Benny says, standing to meet her. Her eyes narrow as she takes in every bit of this reporter – this person who’s set out to try and ruin her life in a much more roundabout way than most people usually do when they’re trying to ruin it.

She looks to be in her mid-thirties; all tall and fair-skinned with curly bright-ginger hair that falls around her shoulders. Her dress sense is understated and practical, and she’s looking at Benny with a combination of faint surprise and something that’s almost hungry. Like a dog that’s been neatly presented with its quarry, all hogtied and sedated, after months of relentless pursuit. “Bernice Surprise Summerfield. What an unexpected delight. And what brings you to my flat on this fine afternoon, without so much as an invitation?”

“Me,” says Shanata from the couch. “Hi.”

“Oh, well, that _does_ make some amount of sense,” says Maria with a roll of her eyes. “Hello again, Mr Sadangi. Still sticking your nose into my business?”

Shanata displays two middle fingers cheerfully. “Well, you still suck, Flenn.”

“Can you two _please_ chill?” goes Mersi, looking exasperated. It all has the distinct flavor of the sort of interaction that’s taken place many, many times before. “And Maria – just... be nice to my boyfriend? And maybe our guest, too. Like. You don’t have to like either of them, but _play nice._ ”

Maria Flenn ignores this. She elegantly kicks off both her boots into the pile of footwear by the door, and goes to sling her messengerbag-style satchel onto the kitchen counter, glancing dispassionately at Benny as she passes by her. “I suppose you’re here to chew me out for ‘slanderous representation of your character’.”

“Well...” Benny, slightly wrong-footed by the dynamic that’s presented itself to her here, falters. “Well, yes. Mainly I want to know what you think you’re doing. And also how you’re getting your information. But mainly that first part. I mean, I don’t even _know_ you – and you seriously think I’m the leader of some doomsday cult?”

Maria is now looking through the fridge, and she pulls out a carton of some sort of extremely healthy-looking simulated-milk. “Well, of course not,” she says. “That would be more than ridiculous. I mean, can you imagine?”

“I can’t,” says Benny. “But apparently _you_ can, seeing as you wrote _several bloody articles on it._ ”

She only shrugs. “I need to build up sensationalist public interest before I start slotting the boring truth of the matter into things, Summerfield.”

“Hm,” says Benny. “I have decided that I don’t like you very much.”

“The feeling is extremely mutual.”

“Oh, I knew that already. The only question is, _why?_ ” Benny gestures expansively with her hands, frustrated. “I don’t even _know_ you! Admittedly, I’m the sort of person who makes a very large amount of enemies on a depressingly periodical basis, so it _is_ possible I pissed you off at some point and just didn’t realize or ever meet you at the time. And if so, I’m very, _very_ sorry, but was whatever it was really worth starting a dedicated smear campaign to ruin my – ”

“Yes,” interrupts Maria, pouring herself a glass of the simulated-milk.

“Oh,” says Benny. “Well. I suppose that answers _that_ question – no, wait, it doesn’t. What did I even _do?_ It had”

“You don’t actually have a reason, do you?” Shanata chips in. “You’re just being a bitch! For no reason. Because you _are_ a bitch. Look, Professor Summerfield’s done nothing wrong – ”

“...Not strictly true,” Benny says, a bit sheepishly. “I’m a war criminal in three separate time periods, on seventeen worlds, and one very small and very pleasant island.” Maria Flenn brightens at this and reaches for her purse, pulling out a battered, nearly-full notebook and an old-fashioned fountain pen. “Don’t – _don’t_ write that down, that was off the record. You don’t even have any proof to back it up!”

“Oh, you’re no fun,” Maria says. She doesn’t put down the notebook. “Now, while you’re here... I don’t suppose I could get a comment or two on the most recent incident of manslaughter and cannibalism that’s taken place on this fine planet of ours? Not, of course, that you have anything at all to do with it – you know I’d never _dream_ of implying such a thing.”

“Cannibalism?” Benny says blankly. “What cannibalism?”

Maria’s eyes sharpen with a sort of predatory schadenfreude. “ _Oh,_ ” she says, entirely too innocently. “You hadn’t heard?”

*

“Honestly, I’m not sure if it can really be called cannibalism when it’s actually really possible that whoever did this isn’t the same species – ”

“Shanata,” says Benny. “I told you to _go home._ ”

“I am going home,” says Shanata. “Home is in this direction. I just also happen to be walking in the direction of the pseudo-cannibal crime scene.”

Maria had very smugly pointed Benny in the direction of Dellah’s latest criminal disaster with the sort of expression that kind of screamed ‘I’m going to take advantage of the fact that you’re going to be present at a crime scene to start even more terrible conspiracy theories about you’, but that’s a problem for Future Bernice to deal with. Right-Now Bernice is working on instinct and currently that instinct is ‘More Bad Crimes To Deal With And The Police Definitely Aren’t Going To Do Anything, Come On, You’ve Got Work To Do’. It’s a bit of a long-winded instinct.

Also, Shanata. She’s still following Benny around like a lost duckling. She wonders if this is what it’s like to have kids, and, if yes, if that makes her more or less likely to actually have them for real. “Don’t you have a partner to get back to?”

“It’s just one crime scene.” Shanata sighs and crosses the street, just a few steps behind Benny. “Come _on,_ Professor, I want to be involved.”

“I think,” says Benny, very slowly, and then shakes her head. “I think you need to find some actual friends. Stop sitting alone in the back of my class. Get drunk, throw wild parties, make mistakes that you will regret for the rest of your life. _Not,_ ” she is quick to add, “mistakes that will _actually_ ruin your life. Just things that you can complain about overdramatically for pity points.”

“But pseudo-cannibalism,” points out Shanata, apparently undeterred.

Benny sighs, and resigns herself to an inappropriately grim and borderline pointless debate. “Okay. Well. Maybe we should redefine ‘cannibalism’ as ‘the consumption of any other sentient being’ and be done with it.”

“No go on that; remember when they proved that all old-Earth cows were sentient all along and just unable to communicate with humans in any meaningful way?”

“Oh – yeah, I forgot about that. I guess you’re right. We don’t want to retroactively define a good chunk of human civilization as unknowing cannibals.” Benny stops at the now-familiar ‘crime scene do not cross’ yellow tape. “Well, maybe we should invent an entirely new word.”

“A new word? Whatever for? Surely the English language has been butchered and fractured beyond repair in the five thousand-or-so years since its inception.”

Benny turns and smiles. It’s Braxiatel. And he’s looking far, far better than he had been looking just a few days ago. That look of lean exhaustion is completely done; he’s walking over with something almost like a bounce in his step and the brightness is back in his eyes. Then she remembers what they’re doing and the smile fades a bit. “Well, maybe we don’t need English. Does Gallifreyan have any words for ‘the act of eating other sentient beings for recreation and leisure’?”

“Ah,” he says. “I see.” He lifts the yellow tape for them to walk under, and ducks under, himself, in one quick elegant movement. “Please do remember that in their natural environment, most Time Lord consume nutrition in the form of bland, easy-to-swallow tablets and the occasional permanently-installed IV tube. Meat hasn’t been on the menu for centuries.”

“No cannibalism vocab, then?” Shanata guesses.

He turns his head slightly and quirks a half-smile in her direction. “Oh, I didn’t say that.” He then proceeds to say something melodic and ever-so-slightly gutteral that Benny’s pretty sure she couldn’t pronounce with a year’s worth of practice. “Or something to that effect. It’s archaic, I’ll grant you, but early Time Lord society was... hm. _Unconventional._ Some may even say draconian, although to do so would imply that it isn’t fairly draconian now, as things stand.”

“I’ll just stick with ‘pseudo-cannibalism’,” Shanata decides. “Flows off the tongue

“A reasonable decision,” Braxiatel replies. “And who might you be?”

“This is my asshole friend, Irving Braxiatel,” Benny introduces. “Braxiatel; my dumbass student – Shanata Sadangi.”

“Ah. I can see why you do murder investigations, now,” Shanata says. “All of your friends have left you. Because you’re a jerk. A cruel, uncaring jerk.”

“Hm,” says Brax. “I think I like this one.”

“Don’t _you_ start,” Benny growls.

And with that they’ve reached the scene of what appears to be a small-scale massacre. Just one person, although you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise in the state that they’re currently in. They’re kind of completely and utterly torn to bloody shreds.

“Oh, there we go,” says Benny, trying not to let the twisting feeling of _nope_ that’s writhing deep inside of her show on her face. “Those are definitely humanoid teethmarks. Looks like Maria wasn’t lying to us after all. How fun.”

“I’m gonna be sick,” Shanata says quietly, a lot quieter than she’s been all this time.

Brax glances at her, then points in the direction of some nearby bushes. She nods at him before stumbling off to, presumably, throw up messily and extensively.

“No law enforcement?” Benny checks, depressingly unsurprised.

“A few are here,” Brax says, pointing.

Benny squints. Three. Two people, one small droid drifting around at eye-level. “I’m calling in the Shadow Proclamation next chance I get, I swear.”

“Implying that they’d be any better at handling this.”

“Mm. More guns and pre-emptive arrests _would_ be involved. Wonder if that’d be an improvement.”

Brax makes a noncommittal noise, and then looks over at her carefully. “Not that it isn’t always lovely to see you, Benny, but... is there any particular reason why you’re here?”

“I was about to ask you the same thing, actually,” she says. “I managed to track down Maria Flenn. She insulted me in a way I’m sure she thought was _extremely_ subtle and then asked me why I hadn’t come here already, because apparently this crime scene is where she was fifteen minutes ago. I figured I might as well check it out, and Shanata – well. Shanata is here.”

“She certainly is,” Brax says. “And – you know, it’s rather interesting you should say that. Especially considering that Ms Flenn’s nosiness is the exact same reason I myself am here.”

“What?”

He fishes out a datapad and holds it up wordlessly. Benny sees the now-familiar sight of the InCrimiNet header, and a big, bold headline: _Man-Eating Maniac On The Loose?!_.

“Christ. Moves fast, doesn’t she?” Benny leans forwards to check the timestamp. “That can’t be – that was posted only a few minutes before she got back to her apartment. She moves _extremely_ fast.”

“Faster than law enforcement, for one thing,” Brax agrees, stowing the datapad away. “Perhaps they should look into hiring her. I have a feeling their response time would increase drastically.”

“And so would the press leaks, probably,” Benny says. “Okay, seeing as you’ve probably already read it – do I want to know how badly she, uh, butchered this one? Am I involved at all?”

“For once, no,” he says, lip curving downwards slightly. “I don’t know if that’s going to be much of a relief to you, considering that she’s managed to weave your presence into every _other_ aspect of what essentially amounts to a self-composed cinematic crime-based universe.”

Benny makes a face. “Gods, that’s irritating. Who let her in, anyway?” She looks around. “Security’s a bit lax around here. Someone should do something about that.”

“Mm. Yes. I’ll see who I can talk to.”

“Because you’re so clearly the one who needs to get things done, all the time.”

“Precisely. I’m so glad you understand.”

They venture closer. One of the law-enforcement people (they’re all pretty much indistinguishable underneath the helmets) nods at Brax, who nods back, and apparently they’re allowed to just waltz right up to the body, which is a very fun and normal thing that can happen.

She accepts the plastic gloves and kneels down, wincing at the smell. Gently peeling back the shredded remains of the shirt, she traces vague circles in the air around this person’s chest, which has just about been gouged to pieces in messy, inelegant chunks. Like an attack from a wild animal, except wild animals don’t stop when they’re done sinking their bare teeth into the flesh of their victims to pull out a precise blade and carefully cut out choice organs and slices of meat. And they certainly don’t leave neat little notes on nondescript printed paper tucked into the ribcage, saying, ‘ _Apologies for the mess. The selection was inconsequential. Don’t bother looking for a pattern._ ’

“Nice of them to let us know,” says Benny when she’s done reading this.

“I’m sure they thought we’d appreciate their initiative,” Brax agrees with a little nod. “Although... hm. Perhaps it’s a bit _too_ helpful.”

“Oh, you think?” She starts to push herself to her feet, and then reaches out to accept his hand when he offers it. “I – oh, oh _no,_ sorry – ”

– because she’d forgotten she was wearing the plastic crime scene gloves, and that she’d been digging around in someone’s torn-open chest only moments ago. And now Braxiatel, who had not been wearing gloves at all, has murder-victim blood all over his fingers and smearing onto the cuffs of his sleeves. He raises his hands, stained red, and examines them with an unreadable expression on his face.

“Not to worry,” he says. “It’s only blood, after all.”

Nonetheless, when he lowers them down to his sides, he keeps them carefully held away from the rest of his body. Fair enough, really – blood is an absolute bitch to get out of clothing.

Somewhat sheepishly, Benny strips off the stained gloves, rolling them into a little ball. Her hands are sticky but perfectly clean. “Do we know who they are yet?”

“Maria Flenn seems to think they’re from a secret slave colony a few planets to the left of this one, but to be honest, I have no idea how she came about that conclusion.”

“I mean,” says Benny, and gestures at the note, which she’d extracted from the depths of its bloody containment and placed gingerly on the nearest clean patch of ground. “They _did_ say that ‘the selection was inconsequential’. Jury’s out on whether we should be believing that or not, but – ” She breaks off abruptly as something occurs to her.

“Hm? You’ve thought of something?”

“I... think...” Benny begins, and then trails off into nothing. She’s statue-still for a moment or two before saying, “It doesn’t make any sense. It’s not backed up by any sort of logical reasoning or substantiated evidence or any prior knowledge at all. But for some reason my brain is currently absolutely _convinced_ that this is the copycat killer’s work.”

“The copycat from the Bright killings?” Brax checks, a slight frown creasing his face.

“ _Exactly_. It’s ridiculous, isn’t it?”

“I...” He hesitates for a split second. “It is a bit of a leap, Benny. You say that you have no evidence...?”

“Just a gut feeling. And I know I shouldn’t be making any sort of decision based on gut feelings but, well... the theatre thing was a gut feeling, too. And that ended up being uncannily correct.” She stares over at the bite-marks. Humanoid teeth. Someone out there is walking around with meat caked into their gums and staining every word they speak and every smile that crosses their face; and maybe they’ve tried to clean it off but it’s still _there,_ whether they like it or not.

Benny comes back to herself with a faint shudder, just in time to hear Brax say, “ – so I am inclined to believe you.”

“Oh. Ah, thanks.” She bites her lip. “Because of my impeccable track record for making good snap judgements?”

“That is what I just said, yes.”

“Good to know that we’re both so predictable. But... even if that _is_ right and somehow I managed to make the right guess out of basically nowhere – two problem. One, how do I start to prove it? And two – how does it _help,_ even if I do?”

“For the first, you could make a start by gathering more evidence,” Brax suggests. “If you’re so dead-set on this idea, that is.”

“You know I am. It’s not as if I can drop it, not at this point.”

“In that case.” Brax takes a deep breath, and then exhales slowly. His eyes roam sideways to fix on Shanata, who’s leaning against a wall nearby, studying the crime scene from a safe distance away. “If this ‘copycat killer’ of yours has killed twice, it’s not entirely out of the realm of possibility that they may have done it before. Before any of this.”

“I can’t think of any significant murders on Dellah, ‘before any of this’.”

“Which does not necessarily mean they didn’t happen.”

The brief conversational lull that follows is broken by Shanata reapproaching, her face looking a shade or two more ashen than it usually is. “Sorry,” she says, uncharacteristically subdued. She keeps her distance, not looking over at whoever-it-is; just within earshot.

“First real up-close murder, huh?” Benny says, semi-sympathetically. There would be more genuine sympathy involved, but she’s dealing with a lot right now.

“I saw the Pakhars. From a distance.” Shanata shudders. “Didn’t feel as real as this.”

“The bite marks do tend to drive the point home somewhat, yes,” Brax agrees dryly. “Are you quite all right?”

“Um, no. But I’ll live,” she says. “Unlike this guy.” She casts a quick glance over and then almost as quickly looks away with a visible wince. “So, you’re... gonna catch whoever did this, then?”

“Well it’s not _exactly_ our job to – ” Brax begins.

“Yes,” Benny says, at the same time.

“Ah,” says Shanata, and looks between them for a second. “Oh. This is the guy whose food you’re married to.”

“Ex-husb – ” Benny starts to correct reflexively, but then her brain catches up. “Ah – uh, yes.”

“As much as I appreciate the compliment,” says Brax, with a slight upwards quirk to his lip that lets her know that he really does mean it, “perhaps not the most opportune moment for it. Considering.”

Which is a neat reminder that someone has been half-eaten and dismembered and is lying on the ground at their feet.

“Right,” says Shanata. “And – do you know anything about who did this? Any leads? Any... I have no idea how stuff like this works. Anything at all?”

“I know they’re not above eating people,” Benny says. “And I know they wanted to point me in the right direction, with that first case. And...” She looks over at Brax. “...They still haven’t found Eddison Bright’s body, have they?”

“They have not,” replies Brax solemnly.

“You know,” says Benny. “I have the most horrible feeling that they’re not going to end up _ever_ finding dear old Mr Bright’s corpse. Shanata – ”

“Yes?” says Shanata, looking a bit started and a bit relieved to finally be addressed.

“Get out of here. And let this be a lesson to you about wanting to be involved.”

“...Yes.”

“Being involved sucks,” she adds, for good measure. “Don’t do it. Doing drugs is actually preferable to being involved.”

“Is it really, though?”

“Eh, close second. Look, I’m getting out of here too, so it’s not like you’re missing much.”

“You’re leaving?” Brax asks. “I would have assumed you’d want to stick around to talk to the investigators in charge. I know they’re somewhat interested in hearing your opinion on this.”

“If by ‘investigators in charge’ you mean whoever passes for the local law enforcement, I don’t think I’m all that interested in telling them anything that’s on my mind.”

The look on Brax’s face tells her that this is pretty much what he’d expected. “All right. Good luck with whatever you intend to do next. And take care of yourself.”

“Check and check,” she says. “Don’t worry about me. I’m only going to see a man about an issue very, _very_ close to my heart.”

*

“I need your opinion on dubious cannibalism,” Benny says, pre-emptively snatching V’Ne’s datapad from his grasp.

He looks as fluffy as ever. Like he’s been put through tumble-dry several hundred times in quick succession and somehow managed to come out smiling. He’s smiling as he looks up at her, although there’s a touch of bemusement on it. “Uh – um, is that how you always talk to new people, Ms...?”

“Professor,” she says, and adds, “Summerfield. We’ve met. Remember?”

To his credit, he does remember. It only takes him a hot five seconds to do so. “Oh! Ah – Professor... Beatrice, was it?”

“Bernice, actually,” she corrects. “But hey! At least you got in the right sort-of phonetic region of my name. Call me Benny, it’s probably easier to remember.” She weighs the datapad in her hands. “Still got your head stuck ten thousand feet up in the air and firmly entrenched in the cloud department, I see.”

He blinks. Slow and steady. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what you mean.”

“‘Course you don’t.” She shakes her head. “The reason I came here – well, two reasons. Number one, would you consider it to still be cannibalism if it’s one probably-humanoid, possible-sentient species eating another?”

V’Ne actually mulls this over for a minute, looking thoughtful. “By definition, no. But I’d say it’s about the same level of fucked up.”

“Whoa!” Benny’s eyebrows shoot up. “V’Ne swears! Good for you, V’Ne. Break those nonexistent censorship laws. All right, that was more a personal thing that’s been bugging me, so... second thing. Ah, I’m assuming you haven’t got the most recent horrible murder victims in yet?” He makes a grabby motion with his hands for the datapad, and she reflexively jerks it back. “Nope. I’ve seen you with this thing. You’ll immediately get absorbed in whatever-it-is that you’re reading, and...” She looks down at the pad, and frowns. Displayed on the screen is a dictation document. But it’s completely blank, not a single word in sight. “...were you in the middle of something?”

“Yes _,_ ” says V’Ne, just on the exasperated side of ‘perfectly pleasant’. “And if you want me to check if any new bodies have come in, I’ll need to look it up on the system.”

“You can’t just... remember?” Despite this, Benny passes the datapad over, and watches as he goes searching for the information in question. “You’re the only person in this place. Also, that was kind of a rhetorical question, I’m about ninety percent sure you _couldn’t_ have anything since I was at the crime scene about ten minutes ago – ”

“No new arrivals,” says V’Ne. His eyes are fixed on the screen again, but he tears away with some effort. “Sorry, you were saying something?”

“What I was _going_ to ask,” says Benny, resisting the urge to tug the datapad away from him again. “Did you end up getting around to the Pakhars? From about a week ago?”

“I did.” This time, he doesn’t have to check the system. He places the screen face-up at his elbow and folds his arms lightly over each other. “Strangest thing. Their blood had basically been drip-drained, every single one of them. Not _all_ of it, they’d have looked like husks, but – a weirdly thorough amount, considering a minimal amount of cutting and slicing. Wonder where it all went.”

“Underground laboratory,” says Benny. “Haven’t you been reading the news?”

“The what?”

“...All right, that’s concerning.”

“No, no, I know what the news is, I just don’t recall what bit of it I should be thinking of. Local news? That article about planetary alignment, or the dissection of how interesting it is how Dellah has a 26-hour day as opposed to this system’s standard 25-and-a-half?”

Benny raises a quizzical eyebrow. “...Is the only news you read science magazines, V’Ne?”

“I _like_ science magazines,” he mutters.

“And I like archaeology magazines, but I _do_ try to keep up with current events. Especially when said current events are very relevant to my current position. I’d recommend InCrimiNet, but it’s simultaneously the most and least trustworthy news source there is currently reporting on this particular nasty bit of business.”

“Uh, should I be taking notes?” V’Ne wonders, one hand inching towards the datapad.

“No, because we’re actually getting off topic. The Pahkar thing – their blood had been drained? I knew that already, but the thing about cutting and slicing... that’s interesting. Were any organs removed?”

“Not unless you count blood. Which most people don’t.”

“So apart from the whole drainage thing, the bodies were in pretty pristine condition?”

“As pristine as a corpse can be,” V’Ne says. His tone is entirely too pleasantly cheerful for the words he’s currently speaking, which Benny has begun to suspect is just his default tone as far as speaking goes.

Benny leans against the desk. “Ever heard of any sort of recipe that uses mainly blood?”

“Recipe – as in, food?”

“Mm.”

“Well, I don’t eat.”

Benny gives him a look of surprise, and then says, “Oh, right. Clone batch baby. Nutri-blocks and regular iron infusions, huh? Fun times.”

“It’s not that bad, once you’re used to it.” V’Ne’s grin is a bit crooked. “Anyway, I don’t know much about recipes or food. Might want to try your friend, the nice theatre-lecturer one; he seems to know a lot about it.”

“Maybe I will.”

“Anything else you needed?”

“Hm.” Benny gives it consideration. “No, I think that’s about it. Thanks, by the way. I know this was all kind of out of nowhere, but you’re the only person I know with, uh, extremely specific death knowledge.”

“No problem – come back anytime,” V’Ne says with a bright grin that lights up his entire soft face with an intensity that actually surprises Benny. “Not many people come in to talk to me any more. And you’re nice, I think.”

“‘Nice, I think’ is one of the kinder descriptors that’s been applied to me over the years,” says Benny. “I’ll take it. See you later, V’Ne.”

“Later, Benny.”

*

Dinner that night is an unexpected sort of affair, but it’s strangely nice to just sit down with Jason and Braxiatel and have a pleasant evening with good food. Jason is a trash garbage man who apparently didn’t bother to pack anything remotely fancy, so he’d shown up in a faded old-Earth Nirvana t-shirt and jeans. Leaving Benny with two options: outclass him with ease, or just give up entirely.

So Benny had pulled on a button-up shirt and knee-length shorts and shown up at Brax’s place in trash garbage solidarity.

To his credit, he’d only sighed at them both before inviting them through. “My apologies for the short notice,” he says. “Something unexpected came up.”

“No problem,” Jason says, shoving his hands in his pockets as he somewhat speculatively eyes the works of art lining the hallways. “I mean, Benny’s been hyping up your cooking for the past few days, so obviously I’ve been kind of dying to see what your whole thing is about.”

“She has? How kind of her,” Brax says, smiling at Benny. “I primarily cook for my own enjoyment, but it’s always a distinct pleasuew to share it with others.”

The man-getting-torn-apart-by-pretty-ladies painting is still there, and it’s just as gorgeous and just as offputting as it had been last time. As they sit down around the dining table, she sees Jason look at it and pull a face and then look closer, his eyebrows shooting up as he considers the women thoughtfully.

“They’re not going to fuck you, Jason,” Benny says, exasperated, as she raises her glass to take a sip of whatever choice vintage brandy Brax has managed to dig up this week. “They’re not _real._ ”

He scowls at her. “Am I suddenly not allowed to appreciate art?”

“Please do not engage in intercourse with my collection,” Brax says, causing Benny to choke on a mouthful of brandy and half-spill it all over her clothes.

Dinner is some sort of sweet-and-sour pork dish, drizzled liberally with sticky glazing and seasoned with spices she couldn’t even begin to try to name. Although it’s more _sour_ than _sweet –_ not in a bad way, just in a _I never thought something like this would taste so good_ sort of way. It’s not like any Earth or Earth-adjacent food, and when Brax mentions the name of it, she can’t quite manage to pronounce it.

“It’s traditionally meant as... well, the closest way I can manage to translate it into a culture you’d understand is a combination of ‘apology’ and ‘thanksgiving feast’,” he explains,

“Oh? What are you apologizing for?” Jason asks.

“Not being creative enough to come up with a dish that has a less pointed metaphorical meaning,” Brax says with a slant of a smile. “But mainly, I quite enjoy the way it tastes.”

And there really are worse reasons to cook something.

It’s about halfway into the meal – and Benny’s mainly sitting back and enjoying the rather pleasant spectacle of watching Braxiatel and Jason attempt to find some sort of common ground despite having pretty much none whatsoever – when Jason sits back, compliments Brax’s cooking heartily, then says, “Actually, I’ve been meaning to ask – Benny mentioned your cooking was great. Have you being doing this whole dinner party thing a lot with her?”

“Only once or twice – I’ve only really just got back into the habit of cooking for my friends,” Brax says. There’s a note to his voice that sets off warning bells in her head. It’s just a bit too cheerful, just a bit _too_ rehearsed. “It really would be lovely if we could do it more often, but Benny’s just so busy these days.”

“Aw, that _is_ a shame,” Jason agrees.

Benny freezes, and then slowly puts her fork down.

“Is this supposed to be an intervention?” she says, tone carefully flat.

“Of course not,” Brax says. “We’re just – ”

“An intervention? What? What are you talking about?” Jason asks far too quickly at pretty much exactly the same time.

This tells her all she needs to know. “It bloody well _is_ , isn’t it? You two’ve been talking behind my back, and trying to – ” She has to pause to take a very deep breath, and then another, and then one more for good measure. She had been having such a lovely evening. “Oh, for the – look, can we just change the subject?”

“I don’t think we _can,_ no,” Brax says. His tone is light and almost calculatedly careful. It reminds her of the tone one might use to soothe a spooked horse. If horses still existed anymore, that is. She can _feel_ what he’s trying to do, and it rubs at her like sandpaper on wool. The prickling feel of angry discomfort intensifies.

Benny wants to scream, or possibly break something. Or worse.

“I need a minute,” she says, instead, and stands up. “Enjoy dessert, or whatever it is. I’m not hungry any more.”

She walks out, heading towards the side office that she’s been in once or twice before. It’s nondescript and not Brax’s main office (he has more than one office, in his _apartment._ It feels like an extremely specific type of overcompensation she doesn’t know how to analyse), and, most importantly, it has a solid door that she can close behind her so she can have a minute or two to herself. Although she doesn’t even manage to get that far.

“Please excuse me,” she hears Brax say from the other room, and then a loud undignified scrape of a chair being pushed out backwards. And then footsteps, fast. Approaching her. She doesn’t look up as he enters the room behind her.

Silence, and then he huffs out a sigh. “We need to talk.”

“Do we?” she says, intending to deflect for as long as humanly possible until she can work out an acceptable sort of excuse for... whatever that was. But she couldn’t have possibly been prepared for what he says next.

“What did that woman say to you?” he asks.

“I don’t – ”

“Down underneath the stage. In the transfusion room.”

“What are you talking about?” she says, swallowing a sudden stab of fear.

“Clarence told me to ask you about it,” he interrupts, with a distinctly unimpressed expression.

“...Fucking traitor,” Benny mutters, and she sort of means it as a halfway-joke, but then it erupts into a thorny sort of genuine rage in her chest. She had _trusted_ Clarence to not tell Brax. And it’s not that she doesn’t trust Brax, in turn, but he’s been all over all of this so far. Getting in everywhere with his _concern_ and his thinly-veiled suggestions that she should take a break or get some rest, just like everyone else she knows, and – and it’s _grating._ She doesn’t need to feed him anything else to get worried about. She wants him to stay in the dark about just this one thing. For once. But _no._ “It’s nothing. It’s stupid. Just drop it.”

“I’m not going to do that.”

“I’m leaving,” she snaps, and snatches up her coat.

“I’m following you,” he replies, snatching up his own in a precise, uncanny mirror of her movements.

She scowls and growls at him but he does indeed follow her to the door, even as she starts speedwalking out of his office as fast as she can. Maybe it’s immature of her, but she couldn’t care less at this point.

Down the hallway, out to the campus, down the street, and he’s still keeping even pace with her. Always staying just a few steps behind.

“Why do you _care_?” she shoots back at him after several minutes of this.

“Because I’m your friend.” He doesn’t even sound slightly out of breath. Bastard, she thinks. Bastard, bastard, fucking bastard; it must run in the family because the level of bastardry he’s currently exhibiting is matched by one person and one person only and they might as well be brothers.

“So maybe you, as my friend, should just drop it and leave me alone! I know you’re trying to stop me from looking into this sort of thing, you and everybody else I know, and, I’m not going to lie here, it’s starting to seriously piss me off. I am not a child, _Irving,_ I can make my own decisions and deal with the consequences. And you don’t need to shepherd me around all the time like I’m some – some useless tagalong who keeps on tripping face-first into trouble!”

“I am doing nothing of the sort, Benny,” comes the reply. “I just want to know what she told you.”

“Fuck off,” she says, very eloquently indeed. She turns left, then right, then right again, and now she’s walking down the fairway and he’s _still not letting up_. She keeps walking, and heads into the local park, and swears a solemn oath to not look back and see if Brax is still following her. If she doesn’t look, he’s not there. She’s not looking.

It’s a lovely park. There’s a couple of people out enjoying the evening air, strolling around the short circuit of a path that winds around the park’s outside. There’s even a beat-up looking miniature playground rusting away at one end. Benny weighs up her choices, and makes a beeline for the playground.

There’s a slide, some old-fashioned swingsets, and a climbing structure. No kids. There’s not many kids on Dellah, weirdly enough. She wouldn’t be surprised if this playground hasn’t been used by any actual children since its instalment. She stands on its outskirts and breaks her solemn oath to herself and – yep, here comes Irving. Damn it all.

The climbing structure is shaped vaguely like a house, in the same way that a Dalek is shaped vaguely like a pepperpot. It’s got a sturdy-enough metal frame, and a sloped bright-orange roof capping it off. This roof is not designed to be climbed on top of. Benny is, nonetheless, extremely good at climbing on top of things that are not meant to be climbed on top of.

“Bernice – ” Brax says when he catches up to her and sees her resolutely clambering up the side of a children’s playground structure with singleminded determination. He cuts himself off, and makes a noise that might be amusement and might be frustration. For some reason, it’s very hard to tell.

She hoists herself up on the roof and straddles it, somewhat awkwardly. And then, when she’s sure she’s got a steady position up there that she’s definitely not going to fall down from, she crosses her arms and pointedly turns her back on him.

“Come down from there,” he says from the ground, now standing at the base of the climbing structure.

Her childishness has reached new peaks, and she is fully aware of every bit of this as she scowls at him and hunches her shoulders. “Just go away already.”

“Talking about your problems isn’t the end of the world, you know.”

She actually laughs, and cranes her neck to look at him properly. “...How are you saying that with a straight face?”

“A lifetime of hypocrisy has prepared me for this moment,” he tells her dryly. “I see you aren’t coming down to ground level. Very well. You leave me no choice.” He takes off his suit jacket, before briskly rolling up his shirtsleeves with precise, careful movements.

And then, much to her combined horror and delight, he begins to climb up to join her.

Briefly, she considers just hopping off the structure and walking away while he’s still struggling to pull himself up to the roof, but decides to wait it out for the sake of the sheer comedic potential of seeing _Braxiatel,_ of all people, perching delicately on top of a flimsy aluminium roof. She’s still frustrated and mad at him, but only very lightly, and she wouldn’t pass up an opportunity like this for the world.

And she’s right. It’s _extremely_ funny, and she laughs at him quite loudly and for a lengthy period of time. But he just very seriously shuffles over so he’s sitting right next to her, and looks out on the park with only a hint of awkward discomfort in it.

Her laughter fades, and is replaced by the realization that she is now sitting at the top of a piece of children’s playground equipment next to the person who she was desperately avoiding talking to.

“Damnit,” she says. “Now I have to explain myself, don’t I?”

“I’d appreciate it,” huffs Brax. “Seeing as I made all the effort of climbing up here for you.”

“I didn’t ask you to, did I?” she retorts.

“I don’t notice you climbing down,” he points out. “An opportunity and an avenue of departure that is entirely available to you, should you choose to make use of it.”

“And I suppose if I do that, you’ll just keep on following me. So it’s not really much of a choice, is it?”

A noncommittal hum.

Benny sighs. “...All right. But please don’t take my willingness to talk after you’ve stalked and followed me halfway across the town as an invitation to, ever, _ever_ do this again.”

“Noted,” he says. “And in turn, please don’t think that I _will_ do this to you again.”

_Unless I think it’s necessary_ is what goes unspoken here, and they both know it and – well, that’s something else they’re probably going to have to talk about, eventually, but for now – this is fine. This will do.

“She told me that she wanted me to kill her,” Benny says. “And obviously I asked _why,_ because that’s not a normal turn that a conversation like that takes, no matter how messed-up the situation is to start with. And she started talking about me like I was... I don’t know, a god or a deity or something? And normally I’d be flattered, I really would, but this was getting seriously weird –”

She chances a look up at him, and the look on his face makes her shiver momentarily, even if she isn’t all that sure why. Time Lords tend to have Resting Ominous Face, she knows this from experience, so she tries not to take it too personally.

“ – so I stopped holding her at gunpoint because I thought it’d... you know, make her a bit more talkative. Less vague about the whole thing. Stupid thing to do, really. I mean, she didn’t try to attack me, but it definitely didn’t make her any less vague –” She shakes him off, abruptly. “Stop patting my arm like that, you have no idea what you’re doing and it’s not comforting _or_ going to make me stop rambling pointlessly. I asked her what she meant. If it had anything to do with all of the bizarre dreams I’ve been having lately.”

“Dreams?”

“I know, I _know,_ I don’t know what I was thinking. It’s not like it’s the sort of thing that she _could_ have been responsible for, and I think I already knew that on some level but I asked anyway. But, thing was, her answer, she said – ” Benny stops, and then she hunches over, folding herself in half. She hits her forehead lightly against her thighs, and lets out a huge sigh. “She said she _was._ ”

“...Responsible for your dreams?” Brax ventures when she doesn’t expand on this.

“Yes. _Yes?_ Apparently! And obviously I said – ”

“‘That’s bullshit’,” he deadpans in a startlingly accurate impression of her cadence and vocal intonation.

She gives him a Look. It’s half impressed and half exasperated. “ – and she said, well no, maybe she wasn’t _directly_ responsible, but she does know who _was_ , and when I asked her who the hell she was talking about, she told me I know them already. And – and, they’re just dreams, right? I mean – yes, fine, I know just as well as anyone that there’s all sort of entities and machines and monsters that can affect dreams and minds and whatever else, but this doesn’t _feel_ like any of that. This is just... weird logical jumps. Shadowy, bizarre imagery. And.” She stops. “Well.”

“Reruns of getting buried?” he offers gently.

She presses her lips tightly together, and nods once, before continuing. “And that’s just trauma. That’s not nefarious or sinister or anything, just my brain doing what brains do. She’d lost it, that’s probably what it was, it’s the only thing that explains any of it. Just trying to confuse me, or scare me, or... whatever it is she wanted. It’s nothing.” She glances over at Brax. “There it is. Now will you _please_ drop it?”

He gazes out at the park thoughtfully. “Not quite yet. The question remains: why did you tell Clarence that he shouldn’t tell me about any of this?”

Benny groans. She would flop over onto her back if she didn’t know it’d probably make her fall off the narrow rooftop. “I don’t know; because I thought you would overreact?”

“Overreact? When have you ever known me to overreact?”

“I – look, I don’t know! I can’t even remember what I was thinking. I was pretty shaken up at the time. It seemed rational enough after I’d knocked her out, and you know what things are like in the heat of the moment!”

Brax takes a breath and then nods slowly. “I see.”

She holds her little finger up. After a moment, he reaches over and links his own with hers, and doesn’t even make a sound of protest when she leans into him, resting her weight on his side and her head on his shoulder.

They stay there for a while.

“It’s going to happen again, isn’t it,” Benny says after a while. It’s getting close to nine, which means the sun’s disappearing over the curve of the horizon, casting violet-tinged light over Dellah’s far-off ocean. They have an excellent view of the spectacle from up here, perched awkwardly on top of a piece of forgotten children’s playground equipment.

Brax doesn’t have to ask. She knows he knows she’s talking about the killings. He says, “Almost certainly, yes.”

“What is it about this place?” she wonders. “It’s – well, all right, it’s not the _best_ planet in the universe, not even in this galaxy, not by a long shot, but it’s not terrible. The university is fine. It’s even a pretty place to live, some days. And there’s just all _this._ ”

“I wish I could tell you the answer to that,” he says with a sigh, and unravels their fingers with a deft little turn of his hand. “But I have the feeling that it’s going to get much, much worse before it ever gets better. And that you’re going to get buried in the mess of it all far deeper than you ever intended to.”

Benny absorbs this, and then nods. “All that talk about you being worried about me – I _know_ you are, but... if I’m being honest for once, you have to be too. Do you _really_ want me to stop investigating this whole thing?”

“I want you to be happy,” he says. “And healthy. And alive. Nothing less than that.”

“Which doesn’t answer the question.”

The sun’s going down. Just faint slivers of violet light left. If Benny stretches a foot out she thinks she might be able to just catch a ribbon of it on the edge of the leather, hold it in place and keep it from vanishing.

“The darkness is rather entrancing, isn’t it?” Brax says.

“Horribly so.” Even from here, she swears that she can almost hear the double-time thrum of his hearts. Steady and unrushed. “Probably not the best idea to get too buried in it.”

“Probably not. No.”

“I’ll be your anchor if you be mine,” she says, an offer without much thought to it but with endless sincerity behind it nonetheless.

“I could ask for nothing more,” he says, and reaches out to take her hand as the sun sinks away and the soft indigo shadows envelop them at last. ~~~~


	4. farci

_*_

_i love you like a freezing woman craves the searing heat  
_ _i love you like i'm tender flesh your starved tongue sings to eat_  
_you love me like a potter's wheel loves all the clay that cakes it  
_ _grind me up and spin me round, i’ll be the one that breaks it_

_*_

The ground is carved out neatly before her, a clean sharp slice straight into the depths of the ground. The staircase leading down into the darkness is too perfectly formed to be natural – but somehow also too organically-shaped to be anything _but_.

“Looks like a long way down,” Bernice says. Her hand twitches for the penlight she nearly always has with her, but the clothes she wears are not her own. There are no pockets, and nothing would be in them even if they were there.

“An unimaginably long way,” the person beside her replies. “But the journey really is half the fun.”

“Oh, come on. I’ve been on far too many stupidly long, _excruciatingly_ boring journeys to even start to believe that.” She walks out one pace past him, and another, and then she’s standing on the first step. The ground is compact and firm beneath her bare feet. No hint of crumbling or quaking at all. “Who’s to say the moment I set foot past step number three, it’s not all going to come crashing down around me?”

“Nobody’s saying it _won’t._ But does it really make a difference?”

“You mean, if I die now rather than die later?”

“We all die, eventually. Or so the propaganda goes. Tell me, have you ever heard a very old, rather tiresome joke about two men and a wolf?”

Bernice steps backwards, out of the downwards tunnel. “Maybe. Tell it to me, anyway.”

“Two men are out camping on the prairie when they see a rather hungry-looking wolf stalking in their direction,” he says. “One man begins to panic, but the other calmly begins putting his running shoes on. The first asks the other, ‘what do you think you’re doing? You can’t possibly outrun a wolf?’ And the other replies – ”

“ – ‘I don’t need to outrun the wolf, I just need to outrun you’,” Bernice finishes. “Someone told me that one, once.” She frowns. “The way he told it, it was a lion, not a wolf.”

“Wolves, lions; not much difference when whichever one it is catches up to you.”

“It is if you’re allergic to cats. What’s your point – are you saying that outrunning death is the same thing? I’m moderately sure that’s not how death’s supposed to work. You know, because death comes to literally everyone?”

A glint of mischief in his eyes. “Speak for yourself.”

“If you’ve got immortality on the table,” she says, “you’d better share it. I don’t much feel like being left behind.”

“It’s certainly not the most angelic of paths to take.”

“But you’re going. So.”

Braxiatel raises a hand into the air invitingly, and she catches it with her own. Their fingers interlace, and then fold over each other like thorn bushes growing together.

“Then I’ll see you in hell, I suppose,” Brax says, smiling at her with that same spark of bright mischief dancing in his eyes.

“Race you to the bottom,” Benny replies, and they step together into the darkness, where it tightens its shadowy hands around them and draws them inwards, downwards, downwards –

*

Benny’s eyes shoot open, and she promptly rolls over. She barely makes it to the edge of her bed before she’s thrown up the remains of last night’s dinner – leftovers, not that it matters exactly _what_ it is when it’s splattered all over the ground of her bedroom floor.

She dry-heaves for a few seconds, and then draws back, wiping clumsily at her face with a wince. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Wolsey bound off her bed in one smooth, swift movement and bolt directly out the slightly-ajar door.

“Sure,” she says, rasping, “sure. Abandon me in my time of need. Oh, _Goddess._ ” She swipes at her face again, biting her lip. It’s strange, because she can’t even remember what was so distressing about the dream that she’d felt the need to – _well._ It has to be something she was dreaming about, because she doesn’t feel sick or nauseous at all now she’s properly awake. Except maybe from the smell.

...Oh, damn it all, she’s going to have to clean this up, isn’t she? And it’s not like her cat’s going to be much help in that anyway. Maybe she _should’ve_ let Jason stay over.

“Professor Summerfield?” There’s a click and a beep and a whir of pneumatic mechanisms from just outside her door, which just about causes her to jump out of her entire skin in one panicked jolt. She’s shaken up enough that she hasn’t decided on what she should do to deal with _possible intruder, person inside her apartment_ by the time a small nondescript metal sphere floats through the gap in the door, hovering unobtrusively in the dimness of the room. “Is everything all right?”

“ _Joseph?_ ” Benny asks, angrily incredulous, and then, “Joseph, where the _hell_ have you been?”

A little blue light beeps on the side of Joseph’s casing as the porter swivels to take in the scene with his sensors. “Oh dear,” he says. “Are you feeling well, Professor Summerfield? My newest upgrades allow me to read your temperature and determine a basic diagnosis, if you consent to it –”

“Wh – no, I _don’t_ consent – hang on, when did you get a medical upgrade? No, never mind, don’t answer that. I’ve just realized I don’t care. _Ugh._ ” She wiggles out of her tangled sheets, and swings her legs over the edge of the mattress, careful not to step in the remains of last night’s dinner. She wracks her brains but can’t for the life of her even _begin_ to remember what she’d been dreaming about. It’s not like her brain’s starved for horrible traumatic things to choose from. With her luck, it was probably another delightful repeat of the Let’s Bury Bernice Summerfield Alive Show.

“If you want me to attempt a clean-up – ” Joseph tries as she flicks on the lights and stumbles towards the door, intending to – oh, she doesn’t even know. Intending to _something._

“Shut up, Joseph,” she says, and it’s refreshingly familiar. And then her brain processes what he’s said. “Actually, don’t shut up. You can do _that?_ ”

“I received many upgrades during my time away, Professor Summerfield.”

“Upgrades? From who?”

He bobs and hums pleasantly, drifting slightly in the air. “The manufacturer,” he replies.

“Who-? – nope, I’ve got to stop starting to ask questions I don’t want the answers to. Sure. Clean up this, if you can. Just... don’t make it worse?”

Joseph begins to hum and spin, attachments extending out of his little chrome-plated frame. “I suspect I cannot do a worse job than you would, in my place.”

“Oh,” says Benny, “oh, brilliant. Did you also get a sarcasm upgrade while you were _away_ , by any chance? Because I hate it. It’s very bad. Especially at... whatever time it is. What time is it?”

“It is five forty-one in the morning,” Joseph says, now busily cleaning away. “And my sarcasm was part of the default package.”

“I’m going to have to draft a strongly-worded complaint to that manufacturer of yours, whoever they are,” Benny decides, and leaves, shutting the door and leaving Joseph to do his annoying Joseph-thing while she goes and finds some coffee, and something very light to eat, because her stomach actually isn’t all that upset.

She’s hoping there’s still some croissants left in the kitchen, but to no avail – it’s been several months since the Gamalian Dragon incident, and to the best of her knowledge, that was the last time any croissants had been in the vicinity of her kitchen. That’s another one for the list of recipes to throw at Brax, now he’s on this entire feverish-cooking streak of his.

She slops some food into Wolsey’s bowl for him to snack on when he stops skulking around near the bookshelves, makes herself some shitty, shitty coffee, and sits down at her tiny kitchen table with a stack of papers that she should have graded weeks ago, and her datapad. It’s a frankly ungodly hour to be awake, but she doesn’t think she could get back to sleep if she tried at this point.

Joseph has emerged from her bedroom to drift around being useless in her line of sight and she’s doodling absent squiggles in the margins of a really incredibly dull essay about Martian soil-dating when her datapad beeps and she startles.

Incoming message, from an unknown caller.

Benny accepts the call, and sees an extremely attractive bare chest that she’d know _anywhere,_ and then the perspective swings around a bit as the person on the other end attempts to wrangle it into a decent camera position.

Benny waits patiently. “Technical difficulties?”

“Only three dimensions, how do you _manage –_ ” comes the muffled reply, and then the datapad on the other end is set down on a table. “There we go,” says Clarence, and wiggles his fingers at Benny through the screen. “Surprise!”

“You swore you’d never stoop down to this level of communication!” Benny exclaims, grinning.

“The data transfer is extremely, _extremely_ slow,” Clarence says. His tone is downright _sulky._

“Oh, boo-hoo, look at you; not a sentient spaceship with ridiculous, overblown specs anymore.” Benny leans in close, looks at his background. He’s in... some sort of apartment? Not very well decorated, and not _his_ if the clothes everywhere are any indication. “Where’d you even get the money for this? Is God giving all his rogue celestial ex-agents allowances nowadays?”

“Maybe he _should,_ ” says Clarence consideringly, with the dawning sort of comprehension that tends to precede casual but extremely intentional blasphemy.

Benny respects and isn’t exactly antagonistic towards the small, pleasant sort of entity that calls itself God as far as Clarence and the rest of his People are concerned – but she has her fair share of grievances with it. The idea of Clarence mounting a small-scale campaign against that floaty little fucker for regular pocket money fills her with ridiculous amounts of radiant joy. She will be encouraging this, to the best of her abilities. “All right, so if not God... who?”

“Well, your...” Clarence visibly hesitated. “Hm. Now, he _says_ he’s your husband, but – ”

“Jason,” Benny sighs.

“ – the minor statistical calculations that I’ve just run seem to indicate that using that phrase for him – yes. Jason.”

“Ex-husband, for the record,” Benny says. “You’re at his apartment, then? He found an apartment? And found you, too, somehow. I’m not sure if I should be disturbed or impressed.”

“We are... roommates,” Clarence says, looking pleased. “Apparently we are to ‘split the rent’. How delightfully human this is all turning out to be.”

Benny scratches the side of her head. “Hm, but – as previously established, you... don’t have money.”

“He knows,” says Clarence, and then, with great pride: “I shall be getting a job.”

“I’m going to need regular updates on this situation, Clarence, because every word that comes out of your mouth makes me love it more and more. You’re getting a _job?_ Do you actually have any sort of qualification for that sort of thing?”

“I’m an angel,” Clarence says. “Shouldn’t that be a good enough qualification for most things?”

“Which brings up a very important theological question: can you put ‘emissary of God’ on your CV when applying to work at the local coffee shop?”

Clarence frowns, and his entire face crinkles up in thoughtful confusion. “Hmm... a coffee shop might not be the way to go. I think my wings might get in the way.”

“You might be able to apply at the university library?” Benny suggests, shaking off her extreme amusement – because he does seem to be rather serious about this, and, well, she tries to be a good friend. “I’ll check when I go in later today. Being able to fly might be a good credential for that sort of thing, as long as you don’t knock over any priceless books. Uh, was there an actual reason you called me?”

“Well, I had just managed to get this device functioning, after trying all night to turn it on,” he explains. “I don’t need to sleep, you see.”

“Of course,” Benny agrees, nodding and trying to hide a smile. Something about talking to Clarence is immensely reassuring, like as long as she has him within her line of sight nothing can possibly go wrong in the world. It’s probably a mechanical result of his programming as a former Ship or some kind of weird God-meddling-in-the-affairs-of-the-universe thing, but she doesn’t especially care right now. “Jason give you my number?”

He beams a sparkling dental-advert-quality smile and points at her, jabbing a finger in her direction. Well, at the screen on his end. He pokes the screen with one perfectly-manicured nail and it distorts, sending sparkling ripples over the image. “Yes! He did! And I saw you were online, for whatever reason, so – ”

“Serendipity.” Benny yawns, and reaches for her coffee. There’s just a few dregs left, and so many more essays to mark, but she’d rather be talking to Clarence right now. “And hey, look – now we can bother each other at any time.” With a finger, she swipes left-right-diagonal and adds him to her contacts list. “Looks like my useless ex-husband is good for something after all.”

“That’s not very fair,” Clarence says reproachfully. “Jason is _very_ nice.”

“You’ve only known him for, what, a couple of days?” Benny retorts, and then bites her lip, and sighs. “Okay, no, you’re right. That _is_ unfair. Jason... Jason can be nice. Actually, he _is_ nice. And you could have a very excellent romantic relationship and marriage with him if you’re into open polyamorous relationships and you’re good at communication and... and if you’re not broken. If you’re not _me._ ”

Clarence is silent for a long, long moment.

“I hadn’t been considering the possibility of entering into a romantic relationship with Jason,” he says. “And I’m pretty sure you know that. So I can only assume you’re not trying to give me advice.”

Benny covers her face with one hand, because it suddenly feels extremely hot in here. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be. Are you all right?”

The genuine concern in his voice makes her want to start crying. If he’s still only pretending to have human emotions, he’s getting very, very good at it. “I... don’t know. Mainly, I just wish Jason hadn’t come to Dellah. It was fine when he was off-world and we were just talking occasionally, but now he’s actually here and he’s getting all involved in my life and my friends...” She looks up at Clarence hastily, nearly knocking over her coffee mug. “I don’t blame you for sharing an apartment with him! It’s good that you’re – making friends and finding a place to stay. That’s your prerogative. I just have complicated feelings about him. This. All of it.”

“Your feelings are valid,” he tells her earnestly, which makes her laugh. Laugh for longer than is probably strictly necessary, long enough that he starts to look concerned all over again for a slightly different reason.

“The thing is, I don’t mind polyamory,” she says, when she’s calmed down a bit. “Actually quite enjoy it, really. I had a few massively heartbreaking three and/or four-way relationships back at the Academy, and then there was that whole thing with Heaven – anyway. Doesn’t matter. The thing is, I’m fine with getting all polyamorous up in my love life, but only if I’m the one who’s actually instigating it. The one who _wants_ it. With Jason, I never instigated it, and...” She hesitates. “...With Jason, I don’t think I wanted it, either. I think I wanted to try staying exclusive with him, just for once.”

“I suppose this is where the ‘being good at communication’ part of that self-directed advice comes in.”

“Give the Clarence a gold star,” Benny says, grinning weakly. “Ah – figurative gold star. I don’t have any actual gold stars right now, I left them all in my office back at the university.”

“...I want a gold star,” Clarence says.

“I’ll, uh, try to find you one. When I’m over there, getting you a job. But, yep. Jason and I were – still are, really – on _wildly_ different communication wavelengths. Which means arguments. Which means misery. Which means divorce, but the sort of divorce where neither of us are really happy about it, and we keep coming back to circle each other like unhealthy co-dependent satellites who occasionally have mind-blowing sex. Ignore that last bit, that was too much information.”

“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear it,” Clarence says. “But I tend to remember everything with perfect clarity, forever, so you’ll have to live with the knowledge that I’m constantly thinking about it anyway.”

“That was a joke?” Benny checks.

“That was a joke,” he agrees. “Any good?”

“Getting there.” She checks the time-and-date readout at the far left of her screen. “Goddess, is it seven already? I have a class to teach in an hour.” She sits up, yawning, and adds, “Which means I need to chug two more cups of coffee, at _least._ And probably go, no. Sorry for keeping you around so long.”

“Not at all,” says Clarence, leaning back. “It was... fun? To talk to you about your problems. Maybe ‘fun’ isn’t the word. It was _good_ to see you, and talk to you, and I’m hope you’re feeling better. How’s that?”

“Very human of you,” Benny tells him. “Next you’ll be getting a mortgage and slogging through paying your taxes.”

“I hope not. That all sounds _ghastly_ – and I still have part of a supercomputer installed within me to do all the math-heavy parts of it for me. Good luck with that class, Benny.”

*

This time, V’Ne finds _her._

“Benny, right?” he checks, upon arriving at her table in the campus cafeteria.

“Look at that, you’re learning,” Benny says, and looks up from her paperwork, which she’s barely been focusing on anyway. “It’s me, hi. Hey, are you... all right?”

Because he does look a lot more ruffled then usual. Like he’s been in through several spin cycles as opposed to just the one, and a bonus miniature tornado thrown in for good measure. He also looks tired in that way that clones from his particular end of the galaxy tend to get when they haven’t been keeping up on their nutrition regimens or sleep cycles. On the ‘slightly blue-tinged’ end of ‘pale’.

“Overworked!” he says, and smiles a default kind of smile that seems more like a distracted affectation than anything else. “Need to get some more staff in. Surprising lack of mortuary professionals on this planet. That’s not the point.”

Benny reaches out a foot and kicks the chair across from her out a few inches. “Sounds painful. Want to bitch endlessly about it in my direction? I’ve got a lot of problems and I think that, somehow, listening to someone else’s instead might help.”

He sits, although it’s on the edge of the chair. Implying that he doesn’t intend on sticking around for very long. And his body language really doesn’t look like ‘I’m about to engage in some good old fashioned bitching about work’ sort of body language. “Actually, I think I’m about to add another one to your list? Of problems, I mean. Is that all right?”

Benny can feel her enthusiasm for this literally draining right out of her. She bites her lip. “I mean, that’s definitely the most polite way I’ve ever heard anybody phrase ‘get ready, I’m about to ruin your day’.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s fine,” she says. “What is it this time?”

He smiles, looking both anxious and relieved. “So, this is almost absolutely definitely against pretty much every regulation in the book, but... I was hoping you could consult for me?”

“On a corpse-related matter?” Benny guesses.

“Er... yes. That and bugs.”

“Bugs,” says Benny. “Great. Is this time-sensitive?”

She’s hoping that the answer is ‘no’ and she has enough time to go off and get extremely drunk somewhere dark and out of the way. But to her more-than-a-little-mild dismay, V’Ne nods. “More than usual. Is that all right?”

This is the _second_ time he’s asked her that, and even though he’s probably the sort of person that would happily take ‘no’ for an answer and go off to bother some other poor archaeologist about Corpse Consultation without a second though, Benny still feels very, very obliged to agree.

_Why do I need to be such a helpful, friendly person?_ Benny thinks to herself. _Maybe I should consider turning evil. Evil megalomaniacs don’t need to agree to things like this. They tend to just do whatever the hell they want._

“...Okay,” she says, instead of brainstorming various plans for Dellah-domination out loud. “Let me just get my bag, and then let’s go and... see your horrible morgue situation, whatever it is.”

*

The morgue is just as empty as it has been for months now. Like V’Ne had said – _serious_ understaffing issues. She kind of halfway expects Braxiatel to pop out of nowhere, because that’s been the routine for... basically every time something like this has happened. But he doesn’t. V’Ne passes her gloves and there’s no Brax, and they enter the lab together and still no Brax. It makes her feel weirdly like she’s sneaking around where she shouldn’t be, although that’s completely ridiculous because it’s not like Brax owns the damn place.

“Um,” she says. “This might be a strange sort of question, V’Ne, but... do you hear – buzzing?”

“Yes,” V’Ne says, and snaps on his own gloves. “That’s why I asked you to come in.”

“Oh, _great,_ ” she says, and then he pulls back a curtain and –

Benny’s stomach twists unpleasantly. She isn’t sure if it’s from grief or from... well. _Ew._

There’s a lot to unpack here, and also the suitcase is on fire and probably filled with nuclear waste and several pieces of extremely incriminating evidence intended to get her in the maximum possible trouble with local law enforcement.

So, there’s a woman lying on the autopsy table, which is always a great start to these sorts of things. She is very, very dead. There are, however, approximately a fuckton of writhing, squirming things crawling all over her that very much _aren’t._ Small, neat holes are punched all through her, some going all the way through her arms and legs and some just extending a short way into her chest or torso or cheek, and in _every one of the holes,_ there’s some sort of beetle gleaming and glistening as it burrows through her. There are _so_ many beetles. They’re all different colors and sizes and although she recognizes a few of them, most of them are completely alien to her – she’s not even sure if they’re native to this planet or not.

“Hey, V’Ne,” says Benny. “Hey. Um. What the fuck.”

“Good question,” V’Ne says, checking his notes. “I don’t know why they’re still in her, either. Her body went cold hours ago, you’d think they’d be dissipating or trying to move somewhere else at this point.”

“That’s... really not the problem I have with this situation, weirdly! Why is she _covered in bugs?_ Why haven’t you _removed_ the bugs, or quarantined her, or sprayed her with insecticide or – or, _anything!_ ”

“Spraying her with insecticide could compromise the autopsy,” V’Ne says.

“ _It’s already compromised! She’s filled with bugs!_ ”

V’Ne looks faintly crestfallen. “Does that mean you’re not going to help me?”

Benny turns away from the corpse, and faces the wall. She takes a deep breath, and then another, and says, “How are you being so _calm_ about this?”

“I physically cannot feel fear,” admits V’Ne. “Fun little quirk of my neurochemistry, right? Makes me very good at my job.”

“You can’t eat, and you can’t be afraid, and you also can’t remember my name,” Benny says. “Is there anything you actually _can_ do?”

“I can love,” V’Ne offers, shrugging. “Passionately and deeply. Was that something you wanted from me?”

“I... I will pass,” Benny says. This is quickly becoming one of the most surreal experiences of her life, and it’s not just because there’s a still-buzzing, slightly-squirming corpse several metres behind her. “What do you _want_ me to look for? I have no idea what I’m doing. You’re the one who’s supposed to be the dead-body expert.”

“Yes, but people have been saying that you tend to make strange mental associations when it comes to this sort of thing,” V’Ne says, paging through documents on his datapad. “Strangely accurate mental associations that tend to lead to you finding whoever it is that actually did it.”

Benny stops, abruptly. “What? Who’s been saying that?”

“People,” V’Ne says vaguely.

“...By people, do you mean InCrimiNet.”

“Well – partly, but also people in general. Law enforcement. The ladies that bring the corpses in from the crime scenes and get them set up in here. That theatre-professor friend of yours. Just, you know, people.”

“ _Brax_ said-?” Benny begins, and then shakes her head. “Okay. I have no idea why any of them have been saying anything like that. That isn’t –” But then she stops and thinks about it, because really _how_ had she made the connection to who was doing the burial killings, or why the blood-collection room had been under the theatre department? It all had seemed so very obvious at the time, but now that she’s thinking about it, she can’t work up any logical sort of explanation as to how she could’ve dreamed up those connections. What? _What?_ “ – I need to make a call.”

“Um, go ahead?” V’Ne says, and Benny steps away to a further corner of the room where the buzzing humming body is less distracting.

She tries to call Brax, but is pre-emptively hung up on. Twice.

_\- this is important,_ she texts him.

_I’m in a meeting,_ he replies, almost instantly. _Is everything all right?_

_\- a meeting so important that you’d ignore your dearest bestest most wonderful friend in the entire universe’s very urgent calls? i am hurt completely and irretrievably. heart broken. you bastard. what if was in mortal peril and dying_

_Are you?_

_\- no. but i am very pissed off_

There’s a long few seconds where the ‘typing’ notification starts and stops several times, and then, _I see._

Almost immediately, she receives an incoming call, and answers it with no small amount of satisfaction.

“Benny,” he greets. There is muted yelling in the background, slightly too far away for her to make out the words. Apparently the meeting he’s in is getting extremely heated. She can appreciate that – she’s been to several archaeology conferences that have gotten _miles_ more rowdy than she would have ever expected, it’s not too far of a stretch to assume that theatre would be the same.

“Hi,” she says. “Quick question: what the fuck is wrong with me?”

“This seems like a loaded question,” he says after an extremely long pause. “...May I ask if there’s supposed to be a right answer here?”

“I’m not angry at you,” she replies. “I’m just angry. There may be a specific target, but I haven’t worked out who it should be, not yet.”

“Ah. A slight improvement, then. To clarify: you are not in mortal peril, mortal danger, or anything similarly mortal?”

Benny briefly considers going into the specifics of the dead woman filled with insects who is currently lying several feet away from her, but dismisses it as too much of a complication. “No more than I usually am. This is about me _maybe_ being psychic.”

A shorter pause, this time, that’s just brief enough for a short, silent inhalation of breath. “I will need some clarification, you understand.”

She explains. She explains the improbability of her wild logical jumps as of late, the way that she seems to be ploughing through mysteries like a hot knife through half-melted butter.

“Are you sure – ” he starts, when she’s done talking, but she doesn’t even give him time to get anywhere with wherever that sentence was supposed to be going.

“ _No_ ,” she says. “No, I’m not sure. Which is why I need you. Would you – no, okay. Question. All Time Lords are touch-telepaths, correct?”

“Most,” Braxiatel replies. “Myself included.”

“Okay, good. I never was sure if that was just a Doctor-thing – you know how he is – ”

“Yes, quite intimately. Why do you ask?”

She has to pause and almost physically steady herself to prepare to ask the question. “Would you be willing to look inside my head? Just to see if there’s anything horribly wrong. Or horribly right, I guess.”

This is weird, she thinks. This is inexcusably weird, even for them. Telepathy’s probably the strangest thing to engage in with a person you have absolutely, positively, one-hundred-percent _completely_ no romantic interest in. It’s too intimate. In a minute, he’s going to say ‘Bernice, what the fuck’ except he’s going to say it in a dignified sort of way and probably with no swearing. Has Brax ever said ‘fuck’ in his life? If she survives the next few minutes she will make baiting him into doing that her sworn goal for the next month or so.

“All right,” he says, easily enough.

“Oh,” says Benny. “That’s not – weird? To ask that, I mean.”

“Maybe just a touch, but I _have_ heard stranger. And you do seem rather distressed.” A second of silence, broken only by a distant yell in the background of the room he’s in, and distant buzzing and chittering from the room that _she’s_ in. “I’m more than willing to give you a, ah, psychic checkup. If that’s what you need. As I said before, I _am_ in a meeting, but I’ll be at your disposal the instant I’m done with this. I’ll contact you then, if that sounds all right to you?”

“That sounds... very good, actually. Thank you,” she adds, almost automatically, and then, “Ah – good luck with your meeting. Sorry for dragging you away from it.”

“Not at all. Anything for you, Benny – and see you later.”

“Bye, Brax,” she says, and hangs up. She stands still for a moment before groaning and stepping back towards V’Ne. “Christ. Fuck. Goddess above in all seven layers of Heaven. Get me a mask and I’ll look at her, because I do _not_ want to inhale any bug eggs or whatever, but I’m not going to be happy about it.”

Five minutes later, and Benny is making faces behind her mask and poking unhappily at the woman.

She’s used to bugs. It’s kind of a default package, with the profession she’s in – you don’t go around digging in the mud for months on end _without_ getting up close and personal with al the creepy-crawlies that inhabit it. It’s not like she _likes_ them, but she can tolerate them. But not so many all at once, and not when they’re literally burrowing through the flesh of some poor dead woman, covered in grime and blood and everything in-between.

At least there’s not worms in her.

Benny doesn’t like worms. Not anymore. She used to respect them in that kind of vague _you’re doing your digging job and I’m doing mine_ sort of way, but after Eddison Bright and the hole and having them squirming their horrible slimy way through _her_ skin, or maybe they hadn’t been and that was all a trick of an overactive imagination –

“Who is she, anyway?”

“First name Xanthe, last name unpronounceable with my vocal chords,” V’Ne says. “So I’ve just been saying ‘Smith’ so far.”

“Questionable choice, but okay. And someone went and pumped her full of bugs because...?”

“If I knew that, you wouldn’t be here.”

“Fair enough.” She knows her way around a dead human body well enough – it’s not like she’s a medical professional, but the way her life’s been going so far, she’s seen enough of the damn things to kind of pick up things on the fly. “Right, okay – correct me if I’m wrong here, but; most of the wounds were done post-mortem?”

“Slash to the throat, then the bugs went in, yes; that was my conclusion.”

“Fun times. Any idea how the bugs are, you know – still alive? Or even just, why they’re still sticking around, considering that she’s dead, and it’s been a few hours – ”

“None.” V’Ne produces a scalpel from a side table, frowns at it, and then puts it back down. “Apart from the obvious, uh, _beetles_ , there were no actual signs of internal disturbance in her body.”

“Internal disturbance?”

“No insect pheremones, or anything else that would attract them to her or make them stay,” V’Ne clarifies.

“ _Very_ fun times. Okay...” She leans closer, and then leans back as a wasp-like creature buzzes out of Xanthe’s nose, makes a neat orbit around her own head, and then flies back in through her open mouth. “Wow! Not liking this at all! So where did she die?”

“Local forensic evidence indicates that she was killed in her apartment.” V’Ne blinks up at her. “Throat slit in bed. She lived there alone, so...”

“So, probably an intruder – someone broke in, got her unexpectedly.” Benny runs a gloved hand through the air, tracing the cut across her neck, trying to ignore the squirming of the woman’s skin. “Then... I need to look at her home, I think.”

“I can’t give you the address – ”

“You called me in to help,” she says. “So let me help. And if you don’t, I can just call up Brax and get him to give it to me anyway, so really – giving me the address is the easier option for both of us.”

V’Ne nods. “I thought you might say that,” he admits, and gives her the address. “Just don’t tell anyone I did this. I’m pretty sure it might be actually illegal.”

“Honestly, I’m not sure who I’d tell it _to –_ it’s not like there’s anyone around here but you these days – but okay. Whatever you say, V’Ne.”

*

The apartment is on the ground floor of the building it’s located in, and it reminds her a lot of her own. Not enough that it feels _uncannily_ familiar or pre-planned by whoever did it or anything, but... it’s about the same size, and looks like it was furnished on about the same budget. Meant for one person, but this particular person won’t be coming home to it. No sign of forced entry, or struggle.

There’s some pictures propped up on the mantlepiece and taped to the walls. Old-school sort of photographs, too, the still and papery kind. Benny leans in and sees the plain but pretty face of the woman covered in bugs (except, obviously, minus the bugs) with her arms thrown around people who Benny assumes to be family members, grinning out at the camera in every one of them. There’s consistency through them. Someone who looks like an older brother; a maybe-younger sister. Two dads, if the Father’s Day snaps are anything to go by. Some aunts and uncles. Happy families all around.

Benny mills around the living room for a minute or two, then grits her teeth and goes into the master bedroom. It’s a lot messier and a lot less happy. There’s the bugstains, for one thing. There’s probably a better word to describe them, but – yeah, it’s what they are. Squished beetles and the juice left behind from the ones that weren’t squished. It all leaves a rather neat imprint of exactly where Xanthe had been when she’s died. Enough so that they wouldn’t have needed to bother with the chalk outline, if they even do that sort of thing anymore.

And then there’s the blood. There’s not all that much of it, but it’s definitely there.

The thing is – and she’s realizing this thing as she continues to look around, it’s a gradual sort of realization-thing – there’s actually no evidence whatsoever of someone having dragged in a whole lot of bugs of various species and types of sorts _into_ this room. Nothing beyond the bugstains. Forensics had indicated that Xanthe had been killed (slit across the throat post-being filled with bugs, and the sequence of events there is disturbing enough as it is anyway) in her house and home; no secondary location, no nothing. Had the killer had some kind of insect storage cooler? Some way to bring them in from outside?

Maybe this isn’t what she should be immensely worried about right now, but it’s the direction that her brain wants to go in. As scary as the thought is that there’s something massively wrong with her way of thinking, the fact remains that it hasn’t steered her wrong yet. If she’s thinking about bugs, there’s the distinct possibility that _where the bugs are_ is the most important bit of all here.

She’s looking around the kitchen, trying to find any evidence of someone having carted a metric tonne of bugs in from _anywhere_ into this apartment _,_ when she hears a door open and close, and footsteps, and doesn’t really get time to turn before there’s a short intake of breath.

“Oh,” says the person behind her. Her voice sounds kind of numbly shocked. Benny turns, and it takes her a moment to make the connection – it’s the person she’d assumed to be the younger sister from the photographs. Her long blonde hair is frizzy and unbrushed. Her eyes are red. “I – I’m sorry, are you one of the investigators? I didn’t think there’d be anyone here.”

“Yes,” says Benny hurriedly. “I mean – yes. Investigator, that’s me, sorry, someone should’ve let you know I was coming? Probably some oversight if they didn’t – ”

“No, they probably did. I just, uh, haven’t been checking my inbox very much. Not since. Well. You know.” She manages a weak, unconvincing smile. “Go right ahead. I wanna get this cleared up as quickly as possible, anyway. Catch the fucker that did it.”

“Right. You’re...” Benny struggles for a name. Names are getting hard recently, especially when they belong to people that are super extremely dead. They all just kind of blur together. “...Xanthe’s sister?”

“Um – oh, yeah. Didn’t introduce myself, huh?” She looks like she’s about to go for a handshake, but then thinks better of it, pulling the hand back to fold it tightly across her chest. “Keira.” She adds a last name too, but Benny can’t think of how to contextualize it into something that she’d be able to write down later. Going V’Ne’s route of just calling them ‘Smith’ seems a bit rude, so she elects to just stick with first names for the time being. “It’s... it’s really messing with me, honestly.”

“The whole, uh...” Benny doesn’t want to say ‘bug thing’. It feels insensitive. But there’s no real other way to put it.

“The bug thing. Yeah.”

“I think it would be worrying if it _wasn’t._ Messing with you, I mean. It’s a messed-up way to die.”

“It’s... yeah. It is.” Keira makes a vague sort of gesture to the living room area. “I’ll just be – mm. I’ll try not to get in your way, I just wanted to... look at some of her stuff. Before it ends up getting divided up, you know? I think Dad and Pop are getting it, but... I wanted to see it all first.”

“You’re fine,” Benny says. “I was about to say, I’ll keep out of _your_ way. So I guess we’ll just be carefully avoiding each others’ company.”

Benny bumps around the apartment for a bit, investigating quietly around in the kitchen and the smaller, unused guest bedroom – but honestly she’s more distracted by Keira, because Keira really does seem like the person she needs to talk to.

Right now, Keira is on the couch, and she’s crying quietly to herself and hastily, messily scrubbing the tears away with the hem of her ruffled t-shirt. She appears to be crying because she’s... looking at some kind of photo album that she’s pulled from one of the shelves. Benny tries not to feel like a complete creep as she comes up behind her on the couch to take a peek at the photos. It’s more of those family photos. Benny can pick out both Keira and Xanthe now, slightly younger and undeniably carefree. In the image that Keira’s hand is currently pressed to, the two sisters are eating something bright blue and dripping on some kind of ocean-planet cruise, covering their faces and ducking away from the camera as they laugh.

She takes a few steps back before she says, “There’s a lot of photos around here, huh?”

Keira sniffles, and looks up. “Oh – yeah, Seb’s basically the family photographer. He’s – ” She sits up, and looks around the room, before pointing to a particular, tinier-than-the-others picture, which has four people standing in a row. Keira, Xanthe, and another man, slightly older than them. “ – that one. Dad took it; he’s usually behind the camera for the rest of these. Likes old-fashioned Earth photography, you know? He bought this shitty handheld digital camera off an auction a few years ago and just keeps sending all of us the snapshots he takes whenever we get together.”

“It’s cute,” Benny says, and manages a faint little smile. “Okay, I’m about to ask something that feels massively insensitive, but I _do_ need to ask. Um, did Xanthe have any enemies? Anyone who might have had a grudge against her, or...?”

“No, no – nobody would have,” Keira says. She looks like she’s tearing up a bit at the thought. “I know you probably hear this a lot, but I swear it’s true – everybody loved Xanthe.”

_Maybe that’s the problem,_ says something in the back of Benny’s mind.

She flinches suddenly, unable to help herself, because _– what?_ Where did that even come from?

No sign of forced entry. No sign of struggle. The most logical conclusion to draw here is that whoever killed Xanthe, she’d known them – or at least been okay with having them in her apartment.

“Is – is everything all right?” Keira says, looking mildly concerned in that way that grief-drenched people tend to when something outside their grief pulls them out for a brief second.

“I,” says Benny, and is distracted from having to tell the truth when her datapad beeps in her bag. She digs it out to see a new message from Braxiatel.

_Done. Come to my office whenever you’re free to talk._

Impeccable timing, as always. Relief hits, like a wave. She loves him inordinately.

_\- all right. see you extremely soon_

“I’ve got to go,” she says, and hesitates. “Stay safe, all right?”

“You too,” Keira says with a weak little smile, and that’s all the pleasantries that Benny has time for. She’s gone like a shot.

*

Braxiatel is eating a steak when she walks into his office. Medium rare, right at his desk. The plate is sitting right on top of a fairly thick layer of paperwork, too. He brightens as he sees her, and gestures with a hand for her to sit across from him as he takes a napkin to dab neatly at his mouth.

“Apologies for my rudeness,” he says. “I only just got a chance to prepare lunch, and I _am_ rather hungry these days. Five minutes, and I’ll be done.”

“Don’t worry. I’m only very mildly mad you didn’t bring any for me.” Benny peers at his lunch. There’s some sort of dark sauce and liberal seasoning, by the look of it. “Where’d you cook it? Staff kitchen?” He nods, taking another mouthful, and she smiles. “So the rest of the theatre department just sat around watching you fry it up, drooling in envy.”

He swallows. “Well, I brought my own meat. If they wanted any for themselves, they should have provided it. I’m more than willing to cook with whatever’s provided for me.”

Benny can’t remember if Brax had been quite this into cooking before Dellah. Granted, a rushed sequence of meetings back on future-him’s Collection and a few brief brushes at her chaotic mess of a wedding isn’t really all that much to work from. And – actually, come to think of it, that’s probably in his future, isn’t it? Maybe he gives up on it at some point before he ends up with the Collection.

She hopes he won’t. She’s beginning to realize his cooking is probably an intergalactic treasure, and should be protected as such.

“Well, as long as you’re eating, let’s hold off on the gritty, serious stuff,” she says. “Let’s talk murder instead, maybe?”

“You have a new case?” he ventures.

“Actually, I meant the recent things Maria Flenn’s been reporting on,” Benny says. “But I do, and, come to think of it, I’m not sure which one is more likely to ruin your appetite.”

“I have a surprisingly strong stomach, don’t you worry.” He begins neatly and delicately cutting up the remainder of his steak lunch into bite-sized portions. “Dealer’s choice, then. Cannibalism, or...?”

“Oh, definitely the cannibalism; no question.” Benny leans back in her chair. “It even looks like the same person as last time. The organs removed, the surgical cuts. The apology notes – although they’ve stopped doing those recently, it sounds like? Strange.”

“Perhaps they thought better of it,” Brax proposes, twirling his fork absently in the air. “I doubt helpful little notes of those sorts would end up being listened to, regardless of how true their content is.”

Benny hums. “Maria’s given them a name, did you see?”

“Yes, I have been keeping up with the press.” Brax’s eyebrows go up slightly, although his expression doesn’t change all that much. “‘The Dellah Devourer’, correct?”

“Catchy, isn’t it?”

“I thought it was needlessly showy, myself. I’m sure she could have come up with something a _bit_ less on the nose if she’d put more than five seconds of careless thought into it.”

“I’ll be sure to tell her that you have cannibal-naming dibs, next time I run into her.” Benny grimaces. “Not that I _want_ to. Goddess, I hate that woman.”

He finishes his lunch and delicately deposits his fork and steak knife on top of the plate before placing it all on a side desk, and turning all his attention to her. “While I quite agree, I think we have bigger problems to deal with. How do you want to go about this?”

She takes a moment to think. “I’m... not sure. Can we just talk about it first?”

“Certainly. Where should we start?”

She thinks for a moment about this, and then says, “...I’ve been trying to pay attention. Now that, you know, I know something’s wrong.”

“You don’t know something’s wrong. Not for certain. Isn’t that why you came here?”

“Don’t do that.” She frowns at him. “Or – okay, yes, fine, sure – I acknowledge the possibility that this is all in my imagination, and I’m experiencing some form of confirmation bias. That’s what you want to hear, isn’t it?”

“Option often can incline to the wrong side. Affection for one's own opinion confines the mind.”

“Don’t you paraphrase the Divine Comedy at me. Are you telling me that you’d be any more rational in my shoes?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t dream of doing so. You know the depths of my irrationality better than most people.”

“Do I?”

A pause. “I’d like to think so. I know we haven’t been friends for _all_ that long, linearly-speaking, but...”

“But we’re still friends,” Benny says, and smiles at him. “And let’s be real, I definitely trust you a lot more than most people on this goddessforsaken planet. I know it’s entirely possible it’s all just me imagining it. Which is why I’m asking you to help me, because it’s probably the most direct way of finding out, either way.”

“Appreciated and acknowledged.” He lifts his hands delicately, flutters his fingers like a magician about to perform a particularly impressive, showy stunt for her viewing pleasure. “Ready now?”

“Yeah. I think so.” She scoots her chair around so she’s sitting on the same side of the desk as him, and then closer, so they’re basically sitting knee-to-knee. “Do your worst.”

“I’ll do my _best,_ thank you. And I won’t modify or change anything,” he tells her. “Not without your consent.”

“Didn’t think you would, but thanks. I appreciate it.” Benny leans in, and allows him to place his hands on her temples. They’re cold against her skin. “Just... whatever you can find. If something looks out of place, or weird, or – anything.”

“Contact,” he murmurs, and she feels her eyelids flutter closed.

It’s not like she hasn’t had Time Lords in her head before, so it’s not a _completely_ foreign sensation. If nothing else, Brax is a lot quieter than the Doctor – there’s not really any other word to describe it. The Doctor has a tendency to make it quite clear that he’s in your head. Not exactly in an invasive way, but in the same way that you’d be a bit noisier than usual while approaching someone in an empty house. Making sound just to let people know you’re there.

Benny probably wouldn’t know Brax was even there if she weren’t paying careful attention.

“Sorry for the mess,” she says out loud, lacing her fingers together. It’s hard not to feel nervous with someone literally poking through your mind, no matter how much you might trust them.

“Please refer to my previous comments about tidy desks,” Brax says lightly. “I find that the same goes for the inside of one’s head.”

A couple of seconds of silence later and he releases her. They both sit back. Benny feels like she ought to be exhausted, but she feels completely unchanged from how she was a few minutes earlier. Brax, on the other hand, is frowning and looking mildly contemplative.

“So?” she says, half-dreading the answer.

He looks at her, and for a moment she can’t discern the expression on his face.

“Benny,” he says, and then stops. The dread grows, and continues to grow as he starts speaking again. “Your mind is exactly as it should be.”

For a moment, she doesn’t think she’s heard him properly. “What?”

“All brain activity is perfectly on baseline for your demographic, barring some symptoms that I’d hesitantly assign to post-traumatic stress. You’re tired and scared, but there’s nothing in there that’s especially out of place.”

She can’t breathe. “Look again.”

“Benny – ”

“No, shut _up;_ look again – you must have missed something. It _can’t_ be nothing. Maybe it’s hiding in my memories or something, I know you weren’t going too deep and I appreciate that you were being polite but I don’t _care._ Just find it. Find whatever it is. _Please._ ” She grabs his hand, and pulls it to her head. He doesn’t fight against it, but he doesn’t do anything else, either. “Brax. Braxiatel. _Please_. I am _begging_ you. I never beg you for anything, you _know_ that.”

His expression twists, then crumples slightly. “Fine. Here.”

She makes a quick note of the fact that he can’t say no to her when she pulls out the puppy dog eyes, and then shoves that to one side and hopes he doesn’t notice that thought, because she really is serious about this even though she can never stop cracking internal jokes in stressful situations.

He takes longer about it this time, and it’s a fraction less gentle, probably because he’s being exceedingly thorough about the whole affair. Which isn’t to say that it hurts or is uncomfortable in the least – just that she can notice it properly now.

When he’s done, he sits back, and he doesn’t move for a long moment.

“You’re terrified,” he says eventually.

“No, _really?_ ” She takes in a deep, shuddering breath. Her chest hurts. “Anything else?”

“I think you already know the answer to that.”

Her lips tighten, and so do her fists, and it’s all that she can do to keep from screaming, and it looks like he realizes that, because he draws back and looks at her seriously. “Would I lie to you?” he asks.

She stares at him for a long moment, and then sighs, falling forwards to faceplant into his shoulder.

He huffs out something that’s almost, _almost_ a laugh, and she just groans.

“I’ll keep both eyes and ears out for anything that might be helpful,” he promises, and his hand comes to land lightly on her upper back. He traces a circle clockwise, and then back the other way, and then repeats the motion. “But I really, truly don’t know what else we can do. Is it possible this could all be a string of coincidences?”

“A bunch of lucky guesses?” Benny sighs. She doesn’t move. “The possibility of _that_ somehow scares me even more than the alternative.”

“Yes. That’s more or less what I thought you’d say.”

*

_interesting_

_very interesting_

_our move, then_

*

The call comes in at nine-thirty the next morning, and when Benny hears who it is that’s been killed, she takes a full five minutes to lie face-down in bed, and moan unhappily into her pillow.

It’s not fair. It’s just not fair.

...She gets up, then calls Clarence.

*

It’s moths, this time. Keira is full of moths. Spilling out of her mouth and out of her torn-open chest. Most of them are still alive, but there’s crushed ones sticking to her red faux-leather jacket, and there’s one or two trapped just under her ribcage that _would_ appear to be dead if it weren’t for the fact that their wings are twitching weakly.

There is one sitting directly on her eyeball, licking gently at it. Benny wonders how eyeballs taste. Probably salty. Especially if you’ve been crying.

Clarence ruffles his own wings, evidentially uncomfortable with the similarities, however tangential. “I... believe I’m starting to realize why the People elected to close themselves off from the rest of the universe.”

“I think I am too,” Benny says. She feels faintly sick, but not like she’s actually going to throw up. It’s too familiar for that. “I’d like to say ‘it’s not always like this’, but lately, I’ve been...” She trails off. “Are we all capable of this?”

“‘We’? ‘This’?”

“Humans. Murder.”

“Ah.” Clarence processes. She can almost see the mechanical neurons firing. “Statistically, no. There’s a large portion of your species who are unlikely to have the physical strength or knowledge to do so – children, of course, but there’s always – ”

“That’s not what I meant and you know it.”

“...I do. Sorry.”

“It’s fine.” Benny sighs. “I met her yesterday,” she says. “Met her _alive._ She was still grieving over her sister, but she let me go through the apartment anyway. She loved her family, liked her brother’s photography, and was more than a little unsettled about the large amounts of bugs they found in her sister’s corpse. That’s all I know about her, because I never bothered to find out anything else – and now here she is, pumped up to the brim like a moth-filled balloon.”

Clarence doesn’t say anything to this, but his wing silently comes up to press against her back; a wall of feathers that she leans into slightly.

“The worst bit, though,” she says, “is how much I don’t care about her.”

“No?” Clarence asks, apparently puzzled.

“No,” she agrees. “I want to find whoever did it, of course I do, because treating people like this is horrible. But I don’t care about _her;_ not Kiera, and definitely not Xanthe. I barely know them and I’ve got so much to deal with, and... I keep venting to you about this and it’s extremely unfair of me, I’m going to shut up now.”

“Benny.” Clarence glances over to her, and his wing curls around her slightly. “I don’t mind.”

“Of course you don’t, but you’re barely a person. You’re still learning to be one, and it’s _massively_ wrong to be forcing all my problems into your still-developing personality, like – like...” She looks around the morgue and back at Keira, fluttering quietly to herself, and grimaces. “Like someone stuffing a woman’s dead body with moths. You don’t need my moths, Clarence.”

“Good metaphor.”

“Thank you, I thought so. Let’s have the rest of this conversation later, when we’re not standing in a morgue.” She pats him carefully on the wing, and then on the side. “So. As long as we’re here and we’re thinking morbid moth-y thoughts... let’s get down to business. With the evidence we’ve got, how should we go around tracking down whoever did this?”

“Well, it seems like a family sort of thing,” says Clarence. “So the first step would be... finding anyone who has a grudge against the – ” Improbably, he manages to pronounce the last name without a hitch, clicks and halftones and all. “ – family.”

“Good first thought,” Benny says. “It’s both of the sisters, so – family grudge? She seemed pretty insistent that nobody had any problems with Xanthe, so maybe they’re trying to get at someone else in the family.”

“In that case, shouldn’t we make steps to protect the rest of the family?”

“I’m not sure exactly _how_ to do that, but – yes, that’s something we definitely need to try to do. Oh,” she adds, something occurring to her. “On a nicer note! – come on, let’s go outside, I don’t want to be in here when I give you the good news – ”

They migrate to outside the morgue, and Benny leads Clarence out to the street. It’s sunny. It’s such a nice day that she could almost legitimately forget that there’s a woman filled with moths only a few minutes’ walk away from her.

“Yes?” he says when they’re on the street and she’s stretching, smiling vaguely and pointlessly up at the sun.

“So, remember when I told you yesterday that I’d see what I could do about getting you a job?” At his nod, she spreads her hands wide and grins at him. “Got you an interview at the university library!”

It seems to take him a moment to process this, and then he’s grinning back at her, just as widely. “I’ve never done an interview before and have no idea what I’m going to say!”

“I can probably give you some tips; I’m an expert on conning my way into jobs I’m not qualified for,” Benny says, clapping him on the arm. “Er, don’t tell anyone I said that. It’s true, but I think it’s the sort of truth that none of my colleagues should ever find out about.”

“Except Braxiatel?”

“Brax probably already knows, honestly. And he’s very good at keeping secrets, so...” Benny shrugs, and then digs around in her pockets before presenting Clarence with a small envelope. “Here you go. Date, time, place, and I threw in a bonus gold star for you because you really did seem to want one of those and I happened to have a spare one lying around. Enjoy!”

Clarence holds the envelope like it’s filled with something very rare and valuable and precious indeed. Which it’s not, it’s just a few printouts and a small piece of shiny golden foil. “Before I got – downgraded – ”

“Downgraded?” Benny’s eyebrows raise. “To human?”

“ _Changed,_ ” Clarence amends. “Before that, my understanding of human friendship was primarily theoretical. I believed that most friendships functioned on a purely transactional basis.”

“And now?”

“Well, I still believe that a lot of it is purely transactional,” says Clarence. “That’s kind of just how people are, isn’t it? But I think that they also do it for reasons that I don’t understand yet. I think you would have given me this opportunity even if I hadn’t helped you out several weeks ago, wouldn’t you?”

Benny shrugs, suddenly uncomfortable. “Well, sure. Maybe, I guess. I mean – there’s a lot of other factors, and I bet you could calculate them, I’m not the _best_ example if you’re looking for perfect altruism – ”

“Don’t sell yourself short,” Clarence replies. “You’re a very kind and clever human, despite your many intrinsic faults, and I’m glad I’m basing the majority of my modified humanoid behaviour off yours.”

“Not my drinking habits, I hope.”

Clarence actually laughs. “Oh no. I’m basing my self-preservation instinct off Braxiatel’s, because he actually seems to have a functioning one.”

“Harsh, but fair,” says Benny, neatly disregarding the fact that Brax isn’t strictly human. He’s human _enough,_ more so than a lot of Time Lords she’s met. Clarence knows this already, and honestly he could be doing a whole lot worse where role models are concerned. “Come on. Let’s try to get this witness-protection thing sorted – and then I’m going to bed. All of this bug-infested nonsense is tiring me out, and I think I deserve the rest.”

*

She can’t work out if the worst bit is how badly her back’s stinging and aching without proper medical supplies to keep it from getting uninfected, or how she’s currently using that infected, bleeding back of hers to attract the local wildlife. For her to eat and kill. Because otherwise, she’s going to starve to death, because there’s literally nothing for her to eat _but_ the nightcrawlers.

She shuts her eyes against the darkness and grips her sharpened stick in one hand and breathes shakily into the dirt. The noises of the jungle around her are astoundingly loud and present, even if it really does feel like if she covered her ears as well she could be lying on any patch of dirt in existence. Birds and wild animals and the breeze sweeping through, but no sign of humanity to be heard from.

Of course not. She’s the only human on the planet. Because going on a solo mission to Capella Four had been a mistake. Going with other people _might_ have been okay because then at least she would have had someone to pull her up that goddessdamned fucking cliff but she’s right here right now with two broken legs and countless internal injuries and she’s waiting for the nightcrawlers to come so she can stab one of them to death with a pointy stick, because this is the point her life has come to.

_At least_ , she thinks to herself as she begins to hear that dreadful familiar chittering noise that signals the approach of the nightcrawlers to the smell of Tasty Benny-Flavored Dinner, _at least it can’t get worse than this. If I get out of this, everything’s smooth sailing from here on out._

There are thirty-seven species of nightcrawlers on Capella Four, all of them nocturnal. Most of them are smaller than a breadbox, and not anything close to a decent meal. But not all of them. A very small number of nightcrawlers are horribly, terribly _large._

There are legs on her bare back. Benny bites her lip and tastes more blood and forces herself not to move because no, not close enough, not yet. Just a few more seconds and it’s dinnertime for Benny, oh yes, and then she can get back to shooing the blasted things away. The sequence of events is simple in her mind – a quick, violent flip over, dislodging the nightcrawler and hopefully stunning it enough that she can spear it clean through with the stick.

Just a few more seconds.

Just a few more –

There. It’s right up against her spine, she can feel the not-quite-a-tongue scraping at her open flesh, digging in as the nightcrawler tries to get a decent taste of her. Her fingers tighten around the stick and she _flips_ , and now she’s on all fours and by all rights the nightcrawler should be squirming around on the ground next to her but –

Nothing there. And there’s still something on her back, except now that she thinks about it properly it doesn’t actually feel all that much like a nightcrawler, because if that’s what it was, the weight would be heavy on the centre of her back. But this is more evenly distributed. She flips again with a grunt, but still the weight remains. And when she twists around painfully to try to see her own back, she quickly understands why.

Worms and beetles and things with far too many legs and wings and fangs, covering Benny like a squirming living blanket. She tries to get up but her legs are still broken and she collapses to the ground with a yell-scream that turns to choking as they begin to swarm up her neck and into her mouth and down her throat and it tastes better than anything she could possibly imagine and now they’re inside her and she claws at the dirt until her fingers are full of bugs and she can’t claw any more and now she’s full of buzzing and humming like never before.

Her brain has become a thrumming symphony, she is in exquisite agony; she is saved.

*

And Benny wakes herself up with her own screams, which is always a fun way to start a morning. It’s also becoming an _increasingly common_ way of starting her morning, but that’s neither here or there.

“Bad dreams?” Joseph asks, hovering somewhere beyond her open bedroom door.

“Who unplugged you from your charger, and who programmed you to be snarky at me at seven in the morning?” Benny asks after a quick, bleary-eyed glance at the clock across from her. Being annoyed is, as it turns out, a very effective way of quickly shaking off the panic and fear of half-remembered dreams.

“I unplugged myself – ”

“You can _do_ that?”

“ – I unplugged myself because I received news that you’ve indicated before now would be the sort of thing you’d want to hear. I heard the sounds of you returning to consciousness, so I decided to make myself apparent.”

“Great,” says Benny, and pulls her blankets tighter around herself. “What is it? Who died?”

She had meant it as a halfway-joke, but had also quite neatly forgotten that, these days, _who died_ is a perfectly reasonable question to be asking, and the sort of question that tends to get a solemn and serious sort of response, to boot.

She doesn’t recognize the first name that Joseph gives her, but she does recognize the last name – or rather, recognizes that it’s the exact sort of name she’d never be able to pronounce reliably without a _lot_ of practice. Clicks and halftones and all. One of the dads that Keira had mentioned, the day before she was killed. One of the dads from the many, many family photos.

“Bugs?” she asks, already knowing the answer.

“Primarily ants, or so I’m told. Braxiatel sent the information across.”

“Of course he did.”

Benny lies very, very still for nearly a full minute.

“I’m tired, Joseph,” she says eventually. “I’m... extremely tired. Words can’t actually begin to describe how exhausted and scared I am, and I know it doesn’t actually matter to you because you’re a cold unfeeling ball of metal programmed with a slightly disagreeable personality, but I’m doing my best anyway, for no reason I can work out.”

Joseph floats and beeps for a moment. “I see,” he says. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

“Unless there’s a way you can bring the crime scene to me so I don’t have to get out of bed,” she says, and just sort of trails off.

“I can do that,” Joseph replies.

Benny blinks, and very slowly sits up. “Hang on, you can-?”

The room around her is now an extremely realistic crime scene, complete with dead body (filled with ants this time, _yay_ ) and half-broken photographs all over the ground. The only thing that’s actually missing is the smell. Benny can’t say she misses it.

She scrambles to stand up, tugging off the covers and shoving them into a haphazard pile at the end of her bed. “Hang on, hang on, I don’t _actually_ want this in my bedroom – turn it off, Joseph, turn it _off_.”

She gets half-dressed – well, she pulls a robe on, and fingercombs her hair so it’s out of her eyes – and then she goes into the kitchen and tells Joseph to show the hologram scene again. This time she’s actually properly awake, and she can take in the details.

She recognizes the body – again, from the photos. There’s ants all over him, inside and out, but she’s getting pretty good at recognizing corpses at this point. The strange thing about this scene is that it isn’t an at-home murder, like all the others had been – he appears to have been found in an office.

“Where is this?” she asks Joseph, eyes already straying to the photos on the ground. _Lots_ of photos. Those familiar family pictures – not all the same ones as from Xanthe’s house, but a pretty similar overlap. All of them individually framed, and it looks like some kind of fight or impact had led to them all getting knocked off the wall they’d been hung up on, behind the body. Benny almost goes to pick them up, before she remembers that she’s not going to be able to interact with anything from this scene. “It looks like... an office?”

Joseph bobs up and down lazily. “Correct. His place of work, in upper town – a law firm, if I’m not mistaken. Which I’m not.”

“Wasn’t he supposed to be in protective custody, at his home?”

“He was. Nobody can quite figure out what happened, but he must have disappeared.”

“And the other two...” Benny frowns. “The other dad and the son?”

“Safe, as of my last report,” Joseph replies. He’s getting quite efficient. He’s even answering all of her questions completely and succinctly. Who went and reprogrammed him to actually be helpful? “They’re at home, and their protection has been redoubled to compensate for this unfortunate slipup.”

“That’s not much compensation, his husband’s dead,” she replies, and rests her forehead against the kitchen table. “Poor man. All of his family, and then his partner too...” Looking up, her eyes go to the photos on the ground. Her attention keeps going back to them. They’re really lovely photos. Less so now that she knows that three-fifth of the people featured in them are super dead in the most insect-riddled way possible, but... “Someone rearranged these.”

“Hm?

She indicates, sweeping with her finger at the photos she isn’t able to touch. “They’ve all been rearranged, propped up so that they’re facing upwards. Did whoever took the holoscan do that?”

“That would be against protocol.”

“That’s what I thought. So, it happened before anyone arrived...” Benny looks at the photos, blurred from the distance and the lack of quality. Picnics and holidays and happy memories. Cracks running through the casing on several of them, broken in a way that’s not easy to fix without replacement. “It’s all about family.” She pauses, waiting for a response that isn’t coming, and watches a very confused-looking Wolsey picking his way through the middle of the hologram. His paws go right through the midst of the gore, unable to even make contact. “It’s something Clarence said, when I was talking with him about it, before. I think he’s right. I think this _is_ about family, and it’s not just... not just revenge. Or anything like that. I think it’s all _in_ the family.”

“I regret to inform you that you’re not making all that much sense,” says Joseph.

“Mm. I get that a lot.” Benny stares blankly at her cat, now sitting contentedly, halfway glitched through the ant-infested chest of a dead man. “How was he taken from his house, is the real question. There were people watching them, right?”

“Correct.”

“So they probably would have heard if there was a struggle. Hopefully. I mean, I’m almost doubtful of _that_ considering how bad, you know, _everything_ is on this planet...” She grits her teeth. “Okay. Assume there’s no struggle to get him out of the house. Reasonable assumption, considering they found him in his own office, and also there was no real struggle in any of the _other_ homes... yes, okay, reasonable. So then, let’s assume _further_ that no struggle means that everybody knew the person that was killing them. Someone on the inside? Someone in the family. Someone who loved the photos of them enough to carefully rearrange them, even after filling a man up with bugs...” Something clicks faintly in the back of her mind. She looks up at Joseph. “The couple – the married couple. They lived together?”

“In the house they’re currently staying at.”

“Alone?”

“No. With their son, Sebastien.”

“Fuck,” says Benny. “The photographer. Of _course_ the photographer. He took all the photos. They _know_ him, he’s family – of course they would’ve let him into the houses. There’s no struggle because they didn’t think he’d kill them, because he’s _family._ ” She shoots to her feet. “You can turn it off, Joseph. Okay, where do I – ”

The hologram flickers out, and Joseph says, “Professor Summerfield, I have just received a new message that seems to be something I should designate... bad news.”

“Yes?” she says, dread already beginning to curl, snakelike, in her stomach. Or maybe it’s more like a nightcrawler. Maybe she’s filling up with bugs already.

“Sebastien and his father have both disappeared from police custody within the last half hour.”

*

She’s dressed and has her back packed with several very specific items, and she’s halfway down the stairs of her apartment block before it occurs to her that she has absolutely no idea what she’s planning on doing. Her mind is racing. She doesn’t know where Sebastien and his father are or where they’re going, but she has a feeling that she needs to go to Xanthe’s apartment again. She doesn’t know why or how, just that she _does._

Which is horrifying in itself, but she doesn’t have much time to waste here.

First things first, before she gets too deeply entangled into this line of thinking.

She scrolls through her communicator, then briefly grudgingly thanks the complete lack of privacy when it comes to social media, because it allows her to see who’s online and within range of her, and that’s exactly what she needs to see, because this time she’d really rather have someone backing her up for what she’s about to do.

The good news: there is someone who’s extremely close – only a few minutes’ walk away.

The mediocre-ranging-to-vaguely-disappointing news: that someone is Jason Kane.

It’s not that – look, it’s not like Jason’s _not_ reliable in a crisis. Because he is. Sometimes. It’s just that she’s really rather have _Clarence_ or _Brax_ or even Professor Arthur Candy backing her up (okay, maybe not that last one, but still). But Clarence is off on an interview with the university library and he doesn’t need to deal with any more of this nonsense as long as she can help it, and Brax is off doing whatever Brax does whenever he’s got time on his hands, and Jason – Jason is the closest.

“Jason, I need your help in breaking into a known murderer’s house,” she says when she finds him at the shitty coffeeshop just outside of the university campus.

“This is a very weird seduction tactic, but strangely, I am still into it,” Jason says, taking off his glasses. Jason wears glasses? Jason _does_ wear glasses now, apparently, although it’s anyone’s guess as to if they’re actually for reading off the screen that he’s been busily typing away at, or if they’re just there to make him look delightfully sexy and erudite. 

“Not a seduction tactic, you were just the closest person and I need an impromptu bodyguard. Take those glasses off, you look ridiculous.”

“I thought I looked delightfully sexy and erudite,” he says, reaching up to do so.

“Well, you don’t,” Benny lies smoothly and entirely convincingly. “Listen, have I told you about the bug thing?”

“The...? No. No, you haven’t.”

“Well, I’m about to tell you about it, so you might want to put that blueberry muffin to one side and very carefully not think about food for a couple of hours.”

“Oh,” says Jason, already pushing the half-eaten plate of muffin at his elbow away, pulling a face. “It’s one of _those_ things; of course it is.”

Benny lays out the facts, and Jason makes a lot of noises of reluctance and confusion until she stops and starts again and lays out the facts a little more clearly.

He’s still frowning. “Wait, so. He’s killing his family? And filling them with bugs?”

“I think he is,” Benny says. “Obviously there’s no way I can know for _sure_ until I find him, but – he and his dad are nowhere to be seen, and so far the killer’s only struck alone. Either the bug-guy decided that going after two people might be a nice change of pace, or the bug-guy _is_ Sebastien.”

“But... why?”

“Well, _damn_ , Jason, I don’t know,” Benny says, exasperated. “All I know is that I have literally _no_ idea where he’s taken his father, and you were the closest person nearby, and everyone I know has told me not to go off and do things like this by _myself._ The plan was to go to the first victim’s apartment and look around for any signs of where they’ve ran off to, and I was kind of hoping to improvise wildly past that point. You know how it goes.”

Jason eyes his muffin sadly for the last time, before groaning and standing up. “Right. I mean, I did come all the way out here to watch your back, so...”

“So you might as well do what you came here for? Exactly.” She waits for him to stand up, and waits (a touch more impatiently) for him to pay, and then they’re off, speedwalking down the street towards their destination.

Benny can remember where Xanthe’s apartment is; it’s only been a few days since she was there the first time. It’s not all that far from the coffeeshop – Dellah City isn’t the biggest place in the world, after all.

But the thing is, five minutes into their Quick And Easy Walk Over To The Bug Murder Apartment, they turn a corner and Maria V Flenn is there. She’s smiling a politely dangerous sort of smile.

Benny immediately turns around and starts walking back the way she came. Jason looks around, confused for a moment, then scrambles to follow her. “Wait a second, was that-?”

“The ginger-haired maniac who’s trying to ruin my life? Absolutely, and I’m not talking to her anymore. Today, or _ever._ ”

“Now _that’s_ dreadfully rude of you,” comes a sugar-sweet voice from a few paces behind them. “Maybe I just want to talk.”

“I’ll tell you what you can talk to,” says Benny, and cheerfully flips Maria off. “Why are you even here?”

“Insurance,” says Maria simply. And cryptically. Which kind of throws Benny for a moment, because she really had been expecting a ‘firsthand research for my crime blog’ sort of answer, and what the hell does _insurance_ even mean – insurance for _what,_ what is she trying to ensure? – but then –

“If you tag along, you’re going to get killed,” Jason says helpfully. “We’re going after a serial killer. Because Benny’s stupid like that.”

Benny does something that can only accurately be described as ‘angry flailing’. “Wha – _stop telling her important incriminating information!_ Look at her, she’s writing it all down!”

“So I am,” Maria says, and caps her pen off. “Don’t worry about _my_ health. I can take care of myself well enough. If you’re really hunting after a serial killer – and am I to assume this is the rather insectoid one that’s been so prominently prolific recently? – perhaps you should start worrying about _yourselves._ ”

*

They don’t manage to shake Maria, and by the time they reach the tiny little apartment on the outskirts of the main city, Benny’s pretty much resigned herself to having an unwanted third party tagging along. At least she seems to know when to be quiet – which is more or less the only solid virtue Maria Flenn has going for her, because she’s taking detailed notes as she walks and Benny can already sense the inevitable clusterfuck that’s going to spring from it.

“Door’s open,” Jason notes as they draw close to the apartment. “Do we... go in? Is this usually how this sort of thing’s supposed to work?”

“Legally? No,” Benny says. “But I’d bet you quite a lot that Maria doesn’t have very much experience with the legal side of things.”

“Funny, I was about to say the same thing about you.”

“Ha bloody ha.” Benny steps up, and nudges the door, which is indeed open a crack. It swings open even further, revealing the mildly-familiar sight of Xanthe’s apartment. “...But in this case, breaking and entering does seem like the obvious choice.”

It hasn’t been cleaned or emptied since Benny had last been there. She supposes that makes sense. The family probably hasn’t had much time for that, what with all the murder and most of them being extremely dead.

“It’s not breaking and entering if we didn’t even need to pick the lock to get in,” Jason points out, and follows Benny in, lowering his voice as he does so. “We should... be a lot quieter, too.”

“What are they going to do, call the police on us?” Benny snorts. “I have serious doubts that they’d even show up, at this point.”

They pass through the living room, glancing around and frowning intermittently at each other. When they reach the kitchen, something immediately catches Benny’s eye about it. She’s about to point it out, when she hears a _click_ and a _slam_ from down the hallway, and she looks over at Jason. Jason, who appears to have also heard it, grabs Benny’s arm and pulls her backwards behind the kitchen counter, and Benny claps a hand over Maria’s mouth and does the same. Maria makes an incomprehensible noise of objection – until she realizes what’s going on, and she very quickly shuts up as well.

Sebastien – the same Sebastien who’d taken all the photos; Benny recognizes him from the reports and the one photograph Keira had showed her – is dragging a bag and a body into the kitchen. He’s humming to himself.

“This is what we wanted, right?” Jason half-mouths, half-whispers at Benny, and Benny has really no idea how to answer that.

There’s a crack underneath the counter, just a slight gap where it doesn’t touch the floor. Benny lowers herself down and angles her head so she can sort of see what’s going on.

Oh, goddess, he’s got his dad. He’s dragging his dad’s body – the one that hadn’t been bug-ified earlier today – along the ground by the back of his shirt. He appears to be unconscious, or... or _something._ He’s not putting up any real resistance to this treatment, even though it definitely can’t be comfortable.

For some reason, Jason seems to decide that the noise caused by Sebastien hauling his dad and a very large duffel bag into the room is the perfect cover to have a conversation under.

“The real question is,” Jason says, voice barely a whisper, “where is he getting all these bugs?”

“There’s a lot of better questions we could be asking, Jason,” Benny hisses.

“He does have a point,” Maria says, her voice similarly low.

Benny grits her teeth. “Please leave,” she requests, monotone.

Maria crosses her arms lightly, looking infuriatingly smug. “If I leave, he’ll most likely see me. And who _knows_ what will happen if he does.”

“Don’t care, go die,” Benny snaps, and then immediately backpedals because – well, no. “Never mind. Just shut up.”

“The bugs,” Jason insists. “Seriously. Where is he pulling them all from?”

Maria raises an eyebrow. “Checking the trade registries would be a good start – ”

“Obviously,” Benny says. “It’s the first thing we tried. Nobody’s been bulk-buying bugs from _anywhere,_ at least not legally.”

“So let’s keep watching,” Jason says. “Maybe there’ll be a brand on the bags he pulls out, or whatever.”

Sebastien does not pull out bags of bugs. Instead, he pulls out a large box, and opens it. It looks like it’s lined with velvet, or at the very least something very dark and very soft. There’s two things inside this box – an ornamental-looking knife, and a small oblong brick-shaped object with buttons all along the top.

Benny jolts forwards instinctively, intending to stand up – because _ornamental knife_ is never good news and this man’s father is lying _right there_ – but Maria, of all people, grabs her arm. Her long fingernails dig into Benny’s skin painfully.

“Do you want to get us all killed?” she hisses. “I knew you were self-centred, but this is really something else.”

Benny wrenches away, furious. “He’s going to-!”

“The man’s already dead, he’s hardly going to get any deader. And what’s a bit of bodily disfigurement between family members, anyway?”

Benny curls her fingers into fists. “I despise you.”

“Both of you, shut up,” Jason mutters, and they do, but mostly because it’s the only sensible choice given the situation.

Sebastien has placed the tiny brick-object on the ground, and is keying combinations of buttons into it with singleminded focus. It beeps, and begins to hum, and he stands back, flipping the knife back and forth absentmindedly. He looks around the room, gaze wandering absently. Benny holds her breath and tries to resist the urge to stand up and ask him what the hell he thinks he’s doing – or, alternately, punch Maria Flenn in her horrible smug face.

After a moment, the box on the ground beeps, and Sebastien places the knife next to it before going to stand over his father’s body. He leans down and presses a kiss to his forehead, slow and careful, and tangles a hand into his hair. After a second, he leans in to hug him. It’s a surprisingly casual, familial sort of hug. Divorced from the context of – well, everything about this – it could almost be considered a normal farewell hug.

“Love you loads, miss you lots,” Benny can hear him whisper as he buries his head into the woollen sleeve of the older man’s sweater. “It’s going to be all right soon, I promise.”

It’s about this point that the ground starts to shake, and Benny realizes a few extremely very important things that she had somehow missed up to now – probably due to the rush of trying to hide, really:

One. The plastic covering of the kitchen floor has been mostly ripped away to reveal a combination of concrete and dirt. Mostly dirt. Two. This apartment is built flush with the ground – level with the earth surrounding it, which means this dirt? This dirt probably goes directly down.

And finally, there is a _lot_ of buzzing and humming coming from the ground beneath of them – to say nothing of the slowly growing vibration.

And then the ground starts breaking open, filtering downwards, and the flies start swarming out, and Sebastien starts cutting into his father’s skin – and his eyes fly open as he begins to scream.

“You said he was dead!” Benny chokes out at Maria.

“It was an educated guess!” Maria hisses back, curling back against the flatness of the stone countertop. “How was I supposed to know? Mainly I just _didn’t want to die!_ ”

“Fuck this,” says Jason, who has apparently decided that it’s his turn this week to do the hasty and inadvisable thing, and grabs a knife off the countertop before standing up and yelling, “Hey! Get away from him!”

Bringing a knife to a bugfight isn’t generally considered a ‘bad idea’, but that’s mainly because it’s also such a stupid idea that literally nobody would think to do it. Fortunately, Benny has the power of dubious psychic associations and also foresight on her hand, and she’s brought a can of bug spray to a bugfight, which she figures will be a lot more effective.

It’s getting hard to see through the veil of swarming flies. A considerable amount of them are flocking towards Sebastien’s father, apparently trying to cram their way into him through every open bodily orifice, so Benny skids across the ground to get to him, curling her finger down on the bug spray trigger.

It works. Kind of. The flies drop like... well, _flies_ , but more are swarming out of the ground to take their place. She tugs her jacket off and drops it hastily over the man’s face, tugging it down because he seems pretty incapable of doing it for himself.

Jason is now grappling with Sebastien on the ground, and Sebastien is fighting like a wild animal. Or a cornered bug, maybe. He’s skittering around and trying to get decent purchase to Stab Jason Back, but it looks like Jason has more skill with a knife than he does.

“Get him to _make the bugs stop!_ ” Maria screeches at the top of her lungs.

– which is what gets Sebastien’s attention. His gaze flickers rapidly over in her direction and then over her and right to Benny and he flinches and drops the knife. Because the moment Sebastien’s eyes catch on Benny, it’s like he just... _gives up._ Not entirely. He’s still putting up a fight, but it seems cursory and half-hearted and more like he’s just going through the motions than him trying to seriously get away from Jason, or even mildly injure him. He lets himself be wrestled to the ground, even as the flies swarm angrily around them and Benny gives up entirely on the bug spray. There’s probably a more effective way of dealing with them anyway, if she can just – right. Yes.

Benny grabs the still-humming box from the ground and, after a quick once-over to try to work out how it’s operating, decides that she has no idea and also doesn’t really care because the way it’s beeping and whirring is setting something buried deep in her head on edge in a major way. She throws it to the ground and steps on it, crushing with one boot.

The ground settles, and the flies dissipate, swarming out through the doors and windows like a dark sandstorm – and within seconds, it’s like they’d never been there at all.

“Jesus,” says Jason. “Jesus fucking _Christ._ ” He slumps a bit in place, but still holds Sebastien down. “What the _hell_ was that?”

Benny sinks to the ground, heart pounding. “Are you all right?” she gasps, looking to Jason.

“I’m fine, I’m fine – ” Jason glares down at Sebastien and shakes him a bit. “I’m more interested in _this._ You gonna explain what the fuck that was?”

Maria rises up slowly from behind the counter, brushing at her hair and at her clothes as if trying to clear off remaining (nonexistent) flies. When Benny catches her eye she just gives her a cool, unreadable expression, and looks away.

Sebastien seems just... vaguely shellshocked. But not like he’s actually in _shock,_ more like he’s thinking very hard about something. Benny watches him for a minute, waiting for whatever kind of response he’s willing to give, and then – when none comes – goes to pull her jacket off Sebastien’s father, who looks like he’s _actually_ in shock.

“You okay?” she asks quietly, and helps him sit up. He just shakes his head, trembling, and holds onto her arm. He makes no move to stand up, so she can only assume it’s for comfort or stability. She doesn’t blame him.

When Sebastien speaks, it’s quite abruptly and suddenly.

“Love,” he says, as if he’s not being held down by a very nervous-looking but ultimately extremely strong and capable Jason Kane, “is one of the most powerful forces in the universe, empirically speaking. Not the most powerful, because gravity exists and entropy exists and so does electromagnetism, but I think I’d give it ninth place, all things considered.”

“Oh, Jesus,” says Jason. “Please don’t tell me you were murdering them and filling them up with bugs because you _loved_ them.”

“There’s no past tense,” says Sebastien. “I love them. I love them, I _do,_ I love them more than you can understand and more than you can comprehend. And you’re right. That’s exactly why I did it.”

Sebastien’s father lets out a single choked sob that sounds like it’s completely devoid of any actual emotion, but only because he doesn’t know quite how to express it right.

“Right,” says Benny, standing up, “well. Cool motive, still murder, come on, let’s just get this over with and – ” She reaches out and grabs his arm, but her fingers _squish_ on it, and her fingers close into a fist, and her heart freezes in her chest. “What – ”

And then Sebastien folds in on himself with a final, beautiful smile.

Benny screams, and so does Jason, and she thinks that even Maria might be screaming a bit too, but she also doesn’t think any of them are going to start judging each other on the whole thing. The situation does seem like a fair and reasonable thing to be screaming in terror about. A man is withering apart, skin flaking away like cracked and crumbling earth.

Worms. There are _so many worms._ And centipedes and millipedes and all of those horrible squirming many-legged things that writhe into the ground so fast that it’s hard to remember how many were even there in the first place – but the worms take longer to go, so it’s the worms that are going to stick in her mind forever when she thinks about this later.

Within seconds, Sebastien is barely there at all – just a few scraps of wasted skin and flesh that are already flaking away into nothing, some shreds of slowly decomposing fabric, and the bugs that are already retreating down, down; deep into the earth. There’s not even bones left.

His father has not stopped screaming this entire time.

“Was he – ” Jason begins, and his face twists, and he shakily gets to his feet and stumbles back to catch himself against the wall. “Was he just _worms?_ This whole time?”

“I’ve seen some pretty disgusting things in my time,” Maria says, very softly. “And this is a pretty strong stomach that I’ve got. But.” Her face is so pale that the faint freckles that are usually barely visible on her nose stand out like any trace of dirt in Braxiatel’s kitchen. “I’m going to go throw up outside.”

“When you’re done with that,” says Benny, trying not to scream or squirm or shake or _whatever_ her body wants to do right now, “make yourself useful and call the police. Although how we’re going to explain this to them, I have _no_ idea.”

*

Someone’s given Benny one of those crinkly foil shock blankets. She thinks maybe they should have given one to her months ago, because at this point she’s way past the point of being shocked. It’s more like ‘silent resignation’.

She’s covered in crushed insect bits, which isn’t making her silent bubbling hatred of the damn things any better, and she’s waiting for the investigators in charge of this sector to hurry up clearing the father so they can get around to clearing _her_ so she can just go home, or go to Brax’s place, or go to Jason’s place and lie on top of Clarence, or – something. She doesn’t really care. She just doesn’t want to have to look at Sebastien’s father’s devastated, confused face any longer, and as long as she’s here she can’t quite tear her eyes away.

The question here that she can’t manage to shake is _why would Sebastien have done this,_ and the reason she can’t shake it is because she already knows the answer and it’s haunting her. She understands _why_ far too well. He’d done it because he loved them, and to him, stuffing them full of living, squirming bugs was the only way he could preserve that love in any meaningful way.

Oh, sure – looking at it from a realistic point of view, it doesn’t make sense at all – but recently, she’s been getting rather good at seeing things in the abstract.

She hates how much sense it makes to her. If she knew something terrible was coming, and that the only way to save the people she loved was packing them with life like that – well, she doesn’t know if she’d instantly jump to ‘bug piñata’ as an opening move, but she can sort of see where he was coming from.

And it’s at this point that she finally manages to draw her attention away from Sebastien’s father and look over to the other side of the foyer, and it’s there that she sees something rather strange. Maria is whispering something in Jason’s ear. He’s frozen, staring at her, and then she draws back and smiles at him. She pulls her purse higher up over her shoulder before walking away with a little ingenuine wave in their general direction.

Jason comes over to Benny. He’s also got a shock blanket around him, although he’s wearing it more like a cape, and she’d probably take the opportunity to laugh at him if he didn’t looks so completely bewildered right now.

“What,” he says, very quietly, “the fuck.”

“What? What is it?” Benny watches Maria Flenn go with narrowed eyes. “What did she say to you? Was it some sort of threat?”

“No, it was – it was just _weird,_ honestly.” He shakes his head. “And it also can’t be right. Don’t worry about it,” he says to Benny, forestalling the (pretty much inevitable) question. “It’s just more of her weird slander bullshit, it’ll just make you angry.”

“Now I _need_ to hear this.”

“...All right, but don’t shoot the messenger.” Jason takes a deep breath. “She thinks Brax is the Dellah Devourer.”

Benny’s eyebrows go all the way up, so high that she’s actually kind of surprised they don’t clip directly off her head and ascend straight up into the stratosphere. “She thinks – _what?_ ”

“That’s – yeah. That’s basically what she said.”

“She... she thinks Braxiatel. _Irving_ Braxiatel. The man who once threw a cutting board across the room because he got a single croissant crumb on his sleeve – is the same person who’s been committing brutal, bloody murders across the face of this planet for the last few months?” It’s almost enough to make her want to laugh, despite the situation – and then she catches sight of Jason’s face. “...You don’t believe her, do you?”

“No,” he says. “No, of course not – it’s stupid, just like you said. And... there’s more important things to worry about.”

“Like the guy collapsing into bugs.”

“Like the guy collapsing into bugs,” he agrees, and there’s a moment where they just stare at each other.

She blinks, and considers, grimacing. “It’s a shame I crushed that box. I think... I think whatever it was, it might have been able to tell us something about – _what_ he was doing. What was going on. Where did he even _get_ that thing?”

“Yeah. That was... do you think he’s dead? He’s got to be dead, right?”

“I’ve never met anyone who _survived_ the experience of collapsing into worms, no,” Benny says. “But the worms looked pretty alive to me. I... _guess_ they’re still in the ground right now?”

“There’s a lot of things buried in the ground on Dellah, huh,” Jason says after a moment.

Benny just sighs. “Yep. Really don’t want to think about them, though. Let’s just... get out of here, okay?”

And they do.

*

_\- better hurry up, you know. Not much time left for any of us. You want this to have a happy ending, don’t you?_

_The stubborn one’s getting closer. We really should do something about that._

_It might just be time for a change of pace –_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it's been a hot minute, huh? 
> 
> okay, so before i say anything else - MASSIVE thanks to literally anyone who's made art or moodboards or memes or just posted about this fic on tumblr or twitter or anywhere else. you're all so wonderful, i am absolutely _floored_ that you seem to be enjoying it so much. like, holy shit! i want to link to all of them here but it'd take all day, so [here's my tag for it on my blog](https://therogueofblood.tumblr.com/tagged/sepelio) and if you make anything for it at all please tag me in it!!! it absolutely makes my day. 
> 
> second of all, i'm taking a lil bit of a hiatus for the next couple of weeks before getting back to writing the next chapter. you probably won't be able to tell the difference, tbh, because i take so long between chapters anyway, but i feel like it's worth noting. anyway the next chapter will also be NOWHERE near this long, i promise. and i might have some goofy bonus stuff for you a bit sooner, depending on how things go on my end.
> 
> thank you for sticking with me!! i love you!!!!


	5. interlude: the butterfly effect

*****

– _and_ _while we’ve got your attention like this we thought it might be interesting to discuss whatever it is you think you’re doing_

_there are a lot of things that are sinfully delicious but your slowly growing panic is new new and fresh new and exquisite_

_you thought you could outthink us and we knew you were wrong but really now really this is verging into the absurd_

_there will be consequences there always are but oh we’ll enjoy these oh we will we will we will_

*****

_[TRANSMISSION BROADCAST FROM: OUTSKIRTS OF EARTH EMPIRE SPACE, UNDISCLOSED LOCATION.]_

– for the terseness of this message, but this is my fourth attempt to get through to you and I am gradually beginning to suspect that there’s someone intentionally blocking all of my attempts at communication, but as always I will keep on throwing myself headfirst at any and all brick walls in my path in the faint, distinct hope that I will be able to make it through. Benny, I believe there is something _dreadfully_ wrong with St Oscar’s University and quite possibly the planet of Dellah as a whole.

This came to my attention several relative weeks ago, since I’d been intending on visiting you to inquire about several very pointed articles that have recently found their way into my attention. I assure you, I had no intention on meddling in your affairs; to all intents and purposes it was meant to be the friendliest of catch-ups. But the TARDIS is being a tricky old thing (as ever) and I also happen to deeply suspect that _I am being intentionally blocked from visiting you_ , because no matter what you say, my driving skills aren’t nearly as bad as to land me in an entirely incorrect location twenty-seven times in a row. I can’t land, not during any time or place on Dellah – past, present or future. Which should not be the case, not at all.

I’m currently docked on Urtilaxian. It is a terrible bore of a planet, and I am currently not even _remotely_ concerned about that, which should impress upon you just how serious I am. Benny, please; if you can receive and understand this message – leave Dellah. Get as far away from the planet as you can, and contact me, and we can work together on... whatever this ends up being. I am worried for you, worried for everyone there, because from the scans I’ve taken, there appears to be something _beneath_ –

_[TRANSMISSION NOT RECEIVED]_

*

“Shrines?”

“Tiny ones, like piles of rocks,” Brax confirms, dunking dirty cutlery and plates into the warm, soapy water in front of him. “Springing up just about everywhere in sight. Haven’t you seen them?”

“Now that you mention it... hm.” Benny frowns, and takes a bite of leftover blueberry clafoutis. “Yep, that’s mildly weird. Please note that I can only really say ‘mildly’ weird, because of everything else that’s been going on recently, but... huh.”

“Indeed.”

“And nobody’s seen anyone doing it?”

“None. It’s just like they’ve been springing directly from the earth, fully-formed. Tiny little piles of rocks, evenly and perfectly balanced. So perfect that one finds it rather a shame to knock them over.”

“No claims.”

“None.” Brax holds a knife up, eye level, and turns it over once, twice – before dropping it carefully into the sink to join the rest of the the soaking dinnerware. “No leads.”

“But no harm, either.” A pause. “They’re definitely shrines, though,” she says. Not a question. “Despite having no markings to any gods or goddesses or miscellaneous deities, and not really being much more than little piles of rocks, artfully arranged just about everywhere in sight.”

“Oh, undoubtedly,” Brax says. “They can’t be anything _but_ shrines. Everybody on Dellah can agree on that, at least.”

“At least it’s not murder this time,” Benny says, and she’s right for almost a week.

*

_[article taken from InCrimiNet, Dellah’s leading resource for up-to-date local true crime reports and interest articles.]_

**RECENT DEVELOPMENTS -** Maria V Flenn

This article’s publishing marks one week since the capture and subsequent instantaneous decomposition of what the authorities have begun to call the Preying Mantis killings. As you no doubt already are aware, the string of brutal insectoid-related killings that took place in a well-loved family of this part of the planet were both unprecedented and gruesome in their execution and baffling to authorities. But that’s not what this article is about, not directly. Readers interested in the Preying Mantis events can find further details on the strange conclusion of the case in question, some possible causes for the improbable events of the family’s demise and speculation on the obvious connection between this and the Dellah Devourer case – at the links provided. No, the topic that really bears discussion _here_ and _now_ is the circumstances of the Preying Mantis killer’s discovery.

Professor Bernice Surprise Summerfield is a topic of frequent discussion on this journal, and often for less-than-savoury reasons. It can’t be denied, however, that her success rate for solving inexplicable and gruesome homicide cases in record time is truly remarkable. Even more remarkable when you consider that it isn’t at all her job to do so. Professor Summerfield works at St Oscar’s University as a lecturer and occasional archaeology consultant. And while archaeology and forensics admittedly _do_ contain some overlap in the ‘dead bodies’ department, Summerfield’s usual form of dead bodies tend to be a lot more ancient than the one’s she’s currently found herself investigating.

Which is why recent developments may either chill or reassure you, depending on what theories you may subscribe to. Planetoid KS-159 is a small, little-known world – that, nonetheless, contains quite the wealth of undiscovered treasure. Recent information leaks have made it clear that this unassuming location has been purchased (and for a very reasonable price, too) by one Mr Irving Braxiatel – a name you may recognize from several previous cases.

Is Professor Irving Braxiatel’s decision to leave Dellah for other, possibly more artistically fertile, climes, really the wisest of choices – especially in the circumstances that we find ourselves in? And especially since it’s almost a _complete_ given that his close friend and co-conspirator, Professor Bernice Summerfield, is bound to follow him. A possible reprieve from the near-constant murders that spring up all around us like flies in a poorly-kept graveyard (if you believe the rumours that Summerfield is behind it all, that is)? Or a sure sign of our impending destruction – since, without Summerfield, crime may very well run rampant without any sign of culprits ever being caught.

As always, the discussion continues in the -

*

Jason is on the couch. Jason has been on the couch for the last week, and he’s only gotten up for the bare minimum of what he needs to do to continue surviving, and Clarence is moderately sure that ‘living on the couch with three datapads and a pile of notebooks’ is neither a sign of good human mental health, or a healthy thing to do in general.

Clarence wishes he had the time to do something like dragging him off the couch and forcing him to go on a nice long walk for a breath of fresh air, or something (because he’s also moderately sure that’s the kind of thing a good friend would do), but as it turns out taking a job at the university library is kind of exhausting. In a way that he couldn’t have predicted, actually. Who knew that doing repetitive, borderline-laborious work for up to and over eight hours a day would be the sort of thing that drained your energy for doing basically everything else?

He does enjoy the library work, though. Genuinely, truly. The books and other miscellaneous texts are a bit low-tech, but in a rather charmingly antiquated way, and a lot of his new colleagues spend a lot of time staring at him, which he finds to be quite flattering. He likes it a lot, and he likes explaining the details of his day to his roommate after it’s concluded, and usually Jason seems to ‘get a kick’ out of listening to it.

Lately, however...

“Jason,” says Clarence, “hello. I’m home.”

“Mm,” says Jason, looking deeply distracted.

“How was your day?” Clarence prompts.

“Mmhm,” Jason replies.

Clarence nods to himself, and then goes into the kitchen to find some leftovers. This is pretty much how all of their conversations have gone over the last week, and he’s not entirely sure what he hopes to achieve by continuing this. He hasn’t mentioned any of Jason’s strange behaviour to Bernice, because she seems to have enough on her figurative plate as it is. And he’s also noticed that her mood tends to fluctuate in unpredictable ways whenever Jason is brought up.

He doesn’t find any leftovers, but they do have a few eggs that look whole and undamaged. He looks back through the door at Jason, and says, “I’m making dinner. Is that all right?”

“Mm.”

This is the response that he’d expected to get. “All right! I will endeavour not to burn our shared kitchen down.”

Making eggs is easy. Every website he’s been on to check agrees on that. He heats up the pan, cracks them carefully open, and waits for them to cook.

It hasn’t escaped his notice that Jason’s strange silence has neatly coincided with the conclusion of that last case, the one with insects; the one that Bernice had recruited to help him with. Every mental simulation he’s run to discern why this correlation is present has come up with a wildly different answer. He hasn’t quite given up on that front, yet, but it is a very near thing.

He finishes cooking, and washes up, like a good roommate is supposed to. (He looked up a few lists, online. He’s been sticking to them – ha – religiously.)

Jason gets two eggs, and a slice of toast. Clarence only needs one, and technically doesn’t need the toast, but he does like the taste of toast. It’s nice, especially when it’s burnt and blackened around the edges. He appreciates some good, crunchy carbon.

When Clarence brings the food in, Jason reacts more animatedly than he has to anything else for the past week – sitting bolt upright, and staring at him suspiciously. “What’s in that?”

“It’s... eggs.” Clarence runs the question quickly through him internal processing core. “Ah, a combination of primarily selenium, as well as vitamins D, B6, B12 – zinc, iron, trace amounts of copper – ”

“No meat?”

Clarence blinks. He has no idea why Jason is acting like this. “No, but there is toast-? – I can go make some meat if you want, I think there’s, ah, pork? In the fridge?”

“No!” Jason practically yells, and then, a bit softer, “no. Ah – no, the eggs are fine. Thank – thank you, Clarence.” He accepts the plate from a faintly bemused Clarence, and begins eating without even taking the fork and knife that Clarence had brought along too.

Clarence stands there and watches Jason going at it like a rabid animal for a moment or two, before he sits down and starts to eat his own dinner.

“Jason,” he says after a moment, “this is an intervention.”

Jason, now three-quarters of the way through his meal and looking a bit more human and less like a living non-theoretical philosophical zombie, looks up. “It is?”

“Well, not a planned one, but I’ve heard that ‘this is an intervention’ is the sort of thing you’re supposed to say just before you confront people about their self-destructive habits. Am I wrong?”

“You’re not,” Jason allows, and then looks cautiously down at his piles of scribbled-on scrap paper and still-blinking datapad screens. “And. This... probably doesn’t look great, does it?”

“I’m worried,” Clarence confirms. “You’ve been like this for six days, seven hours, and twenty-two minutes and counting. That’s about six days more than I’m comfortable with. You said you’d go with me to ‘play darts and drink beer’ a few days ago, and although that sounded _very_ unappealing on every conceivable level, I was still looking forward to doing it. Because it was with you. But.” He makes an aborted, all-encompassing gesture. “You’re... distracted with something?”

“...I guess,” says Jason. He carefully, slowly, sets aside his half-eaten plate of eggs, and just stares at his hands. “I... found out about something recently, and it’s kind of messing with me. Because if it’s _right,_ and I’m right, I’m probably going to have to do something really, really awful. And – I’m pretty sure I _am_ right. And what I’m going to have to do is. _Really_ awful, Clarence. For everyone involved. I’m terrified. That’s why I’m like this.”

He’s not making sense. Clarence makes one of those strange, nonsensical gestures again, because they seem to work well in these situations when he doesn’t really know what to say. “I’m here to listen.”

“You’re friends with Braxiatel, aren’t you?” he says after a moment.

“I... suppose I am, yes,” Clarence says carefully, because Jason’s question feels incredibly loaded in a way he can’t quite put his finger on.

Jason leans forwards. His eyes are dark and serious, his body posture screams ‘I am in quite a bit of mental distress and on the verge of a complete breakdown’.

“Just how strong is that friendship?” he asks. “Because I’m about to tell you something that will sound very, _very_ wild, and if you go running to him about it, I think it might end up being pretty fatal for me.”

Clarence has never before in his life experienced the sensation that humans tend to describe as a ‘sinking of the stomach’, but there’s a first time for everything, and he’s moderately sure that he may be experiencing it right at this moment. There’s something about Jason’s expression...

“He won’t hear anything from me,” he says, because although Braxiatel is his friend, Jason is his friend _more_. “I’m listening. What is it?”

*

_[FOUR UNREAD MESSAGES]_

*

_Irving –_

_Your lack of communication recently has been somewhat disconcerting. We aren’t in the habit of expressing concern through these messages, but I need to know what the state of affairs is in your section of time and space. I must know how things will progress – a divergence point is swiftly approaching. Please reply promptly, for your sake and mine both._

*

_Irving –_

_Memory has always been a tricky thing for us, which is why I mean it when I say that am not overtly concerned about the gaps in my past that occur at your precise point in the timeline. Divergences are common, of course, and my life has been referred to at more than one point as a ‘knitting enthusiast’s yarn box nightmare’ by someone who I’m not entirely sure you’ve met yet (so I will refrain from specifics). No, the fact that you appear to be departing from the expected path isn’t the concern here. But when I delve back into increasingly vague memories of my time on Dellah, I can only recall a deep, gnawing hunger that grows fainter by the minute, and it disturbs me greatly. Whatever you’re planning (you are always planning something, don’t bother to deny it), I advise you to consider your actions carefully before commencing or continuing. Repercussions on this scale may be long-lasting and potentially catastrophic._

_Please reply promptly. I would feel most comfortable secure in the knowledge that you’ve read and acknowledged this._

*

_Irving –_

_I am writing to ascertain that it was indeed your iteration who made the most recent withdrawals from our universal vaults, seeing as they were somewhat esoteric and nonsensical. I don’t intend to pry (I’m sure I’ll understand soon enough), but I feel as if it’s better to be safe than sorry, as humans are so fond of putting it. Kindly confirm that you now possess the following:_

_\- fluid link (x20)  
\- spatial geometer  
\- complete set of Venusian gourmet cooking knives (circa 17th century, acquired late 19th)  
\- mind probe components (var.)  
\- shovel_

*

_Irving –_

_I don’t know what you’ve done, but you need to fix it. You’ve caused this. Bring her back. **Bring her back, now.**_

*

There’s something wrong with Professor Summerfield, Shanata thinks.

Not in the way that most people talk about, the _she’s lost it and she’s always been like this_ way, no this is – this is the sort of ‘something wrong’ that is, like, a disquieting, subtle sort of wrong? She doesn’t know how to pinpoint it, doesn’t know how to nail it down.

Last week, Professor Summerfield had shown up to a lecture on time, which was weird enough in itself – but not nearly as weird as the fact that she hadn’t said a single word. She’d just stared distractedly at the whiteboard, looking rapidly between it and her diary, and had stayed like that for a full fifteen minutes while the class shuffled their feet awkwardly and exchanged confused glances behind her.

And then she’d nodded to herself as if she’d just delivered the most comprehensive and informative lecture of her career, and she’d... just left. Completely ignoring the several people who’d begun shouting after her, and not stopping even when Shanata had dashed out of the lecture hall, trying to get her attention.

It’s, like – horror movie-level weirdness. The sort of thing that you see the minor cannon-fodder characters doing to foreshadow the fact that they’re possessed by ghosts or demons or parasites or whatever, and you just _know_ that they’re going to end up dead before half the movie is out.

And Shanata is definitely the sort of guy who makes on-the-spot impulse decisions without much thought to the consequences (it’s the ADHD, probably), so it doesn’t entirely surprise her when she finds herself knocking on one specific door in the theatre department.

“Come in,” says a voice from inside, and then, as she pushes open the door and steps inside – “ah, Mr... Sadangi, was it?”

“Hi!” Shanata flashes a bright grin that she can actually feel wavering just looking at him. Professor Irving Braxiatel is ridiculously intimidating. Not physically, because he’s actually pretty slight as far as builds go. No, it’s more due to the fact that he seems to perpetually have his entire life together. His wardrobe’s immaculate, his office is peak Dark Academia (although it’s messier than expected) and he gives off the general vibe of someone who’s never been unsure of himself in his life. “Um. I know I’m not an arts major, so if you’re busy I can come back later...”

“No need, I have nothing booked until after lunch,” he says. “You’re one of Benny’s students, yes?”

“Yeah, we met at the... thing.” There’s no good way to say ‘crime scene’, and it feels weird voicing it out loud like that. She closes the door behind her, and sits down at the desk, across from him. “It’s actually kind of about her? That I’m here?”

“I see,” he says noncommittally, and looks at her, expectant.

She takes a moment to collect her thoughts. Her gaze drifts around the office – the rows of crooked, off-kelter books along the walls, the (objectively) gorgeous portraits and paintings hanging in every clear space, the ancient-looking posters for productions of shows that she’s never even heard of. There is a faint smell in the air that she can’t place – not a _bad_ smell, but not a good one either – and she can’t tell where it’s coming from. After a few seconds of searching, she gives up, and says, “So – you’re kind of like her best friend, right? She talks about you a lot. Mentions you in lectures a lot, now that I think about it.”

He smiles, and it’s a gently pleased sort of smile. “Does she, now? All good things, I hope.”

“Uh, mostly. I mean, not lately, because she... hasn’t really been talking about much at all. You know?”

The smile fades. “I don’t. What are you talking about?”

Shanata outlines it, as quickly as she can, because he seems like the sort of guy that Does Not Care At All for extraneous detail and waffling, and the smell in his office is kind of... getting _worse_ , actually. It’s graduated to ‘mildly unpleasant’, and she doesn’t want to be rude and say something about it, but at the same time, she doesn’t want to be there any longer than she has to.

“I have a feeling it’s about the murder stuff,” she concludes. “Like, all those cases she’s been doing? I can’t be _sure_ , but the timing’s definitely pretty weird, and – well, seeing all those bodies and getting held at gunpoint by, like, three separate morbidly-obsessed weirdos can _not_ be good for your mental health. I think I’d lose my mind, honestly.”

“I see,” he says, and hums pensively. “I appreciate you bringing this to me, thank you.”

Shanata shifts uncomfortably. “Uh, cool. I’m glad, I guess?” She hesitates. “What... exactly are you planning on doing about it? Because I’d do something if I could, but I’m only, like, one of her students. I think she likes me, kind of, because she lets me drag her places sometimes, but... doing anything serious would definitely be overstepping. In a not-good way.” The smell _is_ getting worse. It almost smells like rotting meat, and Professor Braxiatel doesn’t seem to notice it at all. His expression is concerned, preoccupied. A man wholly concerned with his friend’s mental health. “If you need me to do anything...”

She hopes he says no, he doesn’t need her; not for anything. It’s kind of awful of her, but she really doesn’t want to stick around, and, distantly, doesn’t want to be involved in whatever this is. Not any more. She’s doing the right thing by bringing it up, she knows, and she also knows that Professor Braxiatel is Professor Summerfield’s friend and he’s the right guy for the job, but the smell is making her nauseous and unsettled.

“I will need time to think on it,” he tells her. “This is a delicate situation, and must be handled carefully and correctly. Obviously the right thing to do would be to get her off this planet, since that seems to be... the root of all of this. But I have a feeling she won’t take too kindly to the suggestion of leaving. Everything she loves is here, you see.”

“Yeah, I...” Shanata swallows, tries not to gag. There’s probably limits to politeness, and she might just be meeting hers. “I get that. But you _are_ going to do something, aren’t you?’

“Well, of course.” A blink. “But as I said, the situation... it’s delicate. I’ll need to think on it. Present it to her at the most opportune moment, perhaps over dinner.”

“Dinner!” says Shanata, maybe a bit too enthusiastically, to hide her growing disquiet. “Great – _great_ idea. Love that. You’re a good chef, she loves your cooking, that’s a – that’s a plan –”

“I’m hungry,” says Professor Braxiatel, very soft and very quiet, and Shanata is pretty damn sure she wasn’t meant to hear it. It’s not quite a confession – more like the sort of thing you’d mutter to yourself at the end of a long day, safe in the knowledge that nobody else is around to hear it. It’s not a complaint or an off-hand comment. It’s more like a _prayer._

A beat passes, and she _knows_ she wasn’t meant to hear it, and furthermore she’s also pretty sure that he doesn’t know she’s heard it, and the meat-smell is getting worse and worse, and really there’s only one thing for it –

“Cool!” says Shanata. “Neat, amazing, fantastic, well! It’s good to hear you’ve got everything under control, and I guess I’ll just leave you to it, because there’s definitely no way I can help, thanks for listening, bye!”

Professor Braxiatel inclines his head, and probably says something else, but Shanata doesn’t hear it, because she is currently fleeing. There’s basically no other way to describe it, because she _is_ running from Professor Braxiatel’s office the moment she’s out of line of sight of him, and her heart’s pounding like she’s terrified even though there’s no logical reason why she should be.

The smell of rotting meat follows her all the way out, and the nausea doesn’t leave for nearly a full week.

*

And –

In a too-small red double-decker bus parked none too precisely on the edge of nowhere, a woman lets out a long string of uncharacteristically serious curses, and slams her hand against the dashboard. Her bus has never been the most accurate of vehicular conveyances, but it’s always been able to get her to where she needs to go when it _counts._ Usually, but not today, because today something is _wrong_ and it’s wrong in a genre of wrongness she’s not even comfortable contemplating.

And –

Somewhere out near the Orion Nebula, precisely twenty-three years before the Earth begins to form for the first time, a small blue box is drifting, and within it, someone has just yelled, “ _Summerfield?_ ” at the top of his lungs, panic warring with confusion. There is no response. _There is no response._

And –

On the main street of Legion, the White Rabbit is completely empty. The countertops are dusty, the cash register abandoned and rusting. The sign hanging crookedly in the front door says ‘closed for renovations’, but it’s impossible to tell how long it’s been there.

And –

Planetoid KS-159 drifts; silent, unoccupied, and wholly unneeded, in the far reaches of the Gamatra Sector. And in a forgotten temple, covered by sand and the dust of ages, a statue who had up until now been as still and quiet as any ordinary grave sighs and shifts, just slightly. Her gaze is as stony as ever, but ever so distant nonetheless. It fixes on the far wall, quietly mournful.

“Oh dear,” she says, and speaks no more.

And –

“Goddamnit,” says Maria Flenn under her breath, “damn it all to hell and back. I didn’t want this. I didn’t want _any_ of this.”

And –

*

“Thank you,” says Renee, and pulls her coat tighter around her shoulders against a nonexistent chill.

The man across her in the shuttle coughs and grunts before lifting the cigarette from his lips in a strangely delicate, elegant movement. “Whatever for?”

“You know,” says Renee, and winces as the smell hits her. “I’m not actually sure.” She leans back, trying not to be too obvious about it, and thinks. “You arranged for me to get off this planet – ”

“I did.”

All of her personal belongings worth taking are packaged up and boxed into the cargo bay of the shuttle. Every dress, every book, every memento. Even her cello. “You don’t even _know_ me. I definitely don’t know you.”

“You know my name.” A yellowed, curling grin.

“John,” she says, sceptical. “Sure.”

It hadn’t been a rushed evacuation, not by anyone’s standards. Just her, and a handful of St Oscar’s staff that John had managed to find and convince to leave. They’d had weeks in advance to prepare, plenty of time to back out. It hadn’t been a coercion or blackmailed sort of affair in the least. He’d laid out all the evidence, been completely transparent with the travel arrangements, been amazingly non-threatening about the whole thing considering his natural demeanour and appearance in general ( _ridiculously_ threatening and _deeply_ shady).

His only condition had been simple enough: not telling anyone outside the small cohort that they’d be leaving. Which had almost been suspicious enough that Renee had felt the need to break it, on principle – to tell Irving, or someone else – but really, were there many other people _besides_ Irving to tell? It’s not as if Renee had family or very many friends on Dellah, and quite besides that, life on this planet had been unsettling her for quite a while now, in a way she couldn’t quite place. Gnawing at her like tiny sharp-toothed creatures nested under her skin. The people, more distant. The crimes and tragedies, increasing exponentially.

And there’s something about Irving –

Or maybe not. Maybe she’s just imagining things.

...So, no. She hadn’t told anyone. She wants off Dellah as much as anyone else here, and mainstream travel arrangements are getting pricier by the day. Everyone wants to leave, so up the prices go. Hooray for space capitalism. At least John’s method off-planet is reasonable and free, even if she does suspect he has at least one, if not half a million, ulterior motives.

“Are you planning on going back?” Renee asks John, not really sure if she wants the answer. “To Dellah, that is. Since you seem to have, um. Unfinished business there.”

“Irving Braxiatel and I _do_ have unfinished business,” says John, gaze distant – but then it sharpens, and he’s looking at her in that way that makes her feel about as significant as a single speck of dirt in an infinite mudpit. “But then again, he seems to be quite occupied at the moment. I’d hate to get in-between him and any destruction he’s about to wreak upon himself.”

“Really?” says Renee weakly, having next to no idea what he’s talking about and not really wanting to know.

“Oh yes,” replies John. “Besides, I prefer myself alive and well. Sticking around too long, for me, would end up being a death sentence. I think I’d find myself taking the role of, what’s the term-? Cannon fodder.”

“Oh,” says Renee, understanding even less now, but at the same time beginning to understand quite a bit about things that she absolutely does _not_ want to know about.

For just a second, the shuttle hangs there – trapped in between gravity and lift, as if Dellah doesn’t want to let them go. But then it rumbles and rattles as it breaks free from the planet’s orbit. The distant lights of other civilisations beckon.

“I hope they’ll be all right,” Renee says as she peers out through the rear window. “I know it’s a tactical retreat, but I have the most horrible feeling that we’re... you know, just – running away. That makes me feel like a coward.” She looks over at John. “I’m not a coward.”

“That’s fine,” John tells her, and with another one of those horrible little smiles, confides: “I am.” 

And they’re gone.

*

Apparently there’s a dead body out near the highest concentration of shrines. Benny doesn’t want to go look at it, but something’s telling her that she should. And Brax has volunteered to come, _so._ If worst comes to worst, she can just give him an extremely meaningful look and/or puppy-dog eyes, and she can leave and let him deal with whatever it is himself.

“Bernice,” he says, on their way over. “Do you remember our discussion about Orpheus?”

She frowns at him, thrown by the non-sequitur and half-preoccupied with horrible predictions of what’s going to be waiting for them. “No? What?”

“I see.” His fingers flutter idly, like he’s remembering the finger placements to a long-forgotten piano concerto. “I suppose that’s understandable, considering just how inebriated you happened to be at the time.”

“Ah. Drunk Bernice shenanigans, I see.” She groans, lets her shoulders slump. “I guess I must’ve ranted about what a fucking moron he was, right?”

“In a nutshell. I did express my own opinions on the matter, but I’m sure you can guess – ”

“Orpheus’s idiocy is the entire point, tragedies only exist so you can yell at the screen and cover your face in horror when everything goes wrong exactly as expected, he was always going to look back and I should stop getting worked up about stupid old myths that don’t have any basis in reality?”

“Not... _quite._ ” She gets the impression he’s biting back laughter. “The first two points, maybe.”

“I may be projecting.”

“Just a little.”

“You ever feel bad for Hades, though?” Benny says after another few steps.

“The lord of the dead?”

“Mm. I mean, he couldn’t go around letting any idiot with a lyre and a pretty song wander out of the underworld with whatever dead person they wanted to drag out of there,” she reasons. “Bad for reputation, and if _he_ could do it, anybody could.”

“Reputation is everything when you’re king, yes.”

“He’s gotta keep his wife happy, though, so.” Benny shrugs. “Mean old trick, is what I’m saying. Mean old man.”

“You still feel bad for him?” Brax asks. “To be honest, so do I, although I’ve never put much thought into it.”

“What can I say? I love overanalysing old myths, and I’ve always had a soft spot for minor characters in impossible situations.” Benny looks left and right and they cross the street. “Why are we even talking about Orpheus and Eurydice, anyway? That myth makes me angry. Did I mention that I hate – ”

“Hate tragedies?” A slight teasing smile curls across his lips, and he glances across at her. “That... may have come up.”

“Oh boy,” she says. “Must’ve been really drunk, then.”

“You must have been, yes.”

“You saw the article, right?” she says, switching subjects abruptly. To his credit, he takes it in stride.

“Ms Flenn? Of course.” A delicate frown. “It’s almost akin to seeing a shuttle crashing in the slowest of motion, isn’t it?”

“Mm.” She shoots him a sideways glance, curiosity bubbling up. “Well. _Are_ you?”

“Hm?”

“Planning on moving over to Planetoid KS-159. You know. Like she claimed.”

His reaction, to her surprise, is one of complete puzzlement as he shakes his head. “It hadn’t even crossed my mind. Mainly because I’ve never so much as heard of the place. Dellah is my home for the foreseeable future – why would I bother to move to some presumably uninhabited planetoid?”

Benny, who has been friends with Brax since before she even _knew_ him properly – timelines; they’re a bitch – is silent. Because she _knows_ that KS-159 is where he’s eventually going to move to set up his Collection, even though she has no idea _when_ or _why_ or _how,_ and she’s not sure if bringing that up to him would wreak any sort of time-related havoc upon events that are supposed to unfold.

“Strange of her to bring that up, then,” she says, instead.

“Very strange,” comes the agreement. “I can’t fathom it, myself. And you with me – do you suppose she was looking to prod us into doing something?”

“Unsubtle sort of prod, if that’s it.”

They round the corner, following the trail of shrines, and see that they are indeed getting more concentrated as they go. Tiny little heapings of perfectly-balanced stones. They’re almost providing a sort of causeway for the two of them to walk down. A causeway leading to the poor, poor man who’s currently lying in the middle of a mess of police tape and technicians and reporters who are all talking to each other, humming and muttering like an angry bee’s nest. No. Shit. Benny doesn’t want to think about bugs. She’s gone off bugs for the rest of her life.

“Hey,” she says to the nearest technician, another one of those people she doesn’t recognize. “We’re here for the – ”

At the sight of them, the technician goes bone-pale and stumbles away so quickly that Benny is briefly genuinely lost for words. She turns to Brax, but he just shakes his head; apparently as baffled as she is.

The technician is now talking with some official-looking people. Benny tries to get closer, but the moment she even comes _close_ to the body and the people around it, she’s none-too-gently blocked off and shooed back.

Benny realizes abruptly that quite a lot of people are staring. Staring at Braxiatel, specifically. And they’re whispering amongst themselves in that particular hushed whisper-y tone of voice she associates heavily with bad news and bad occurrences. She feels a sudden wave of dread rush over her.

Some of those official-looking people are now approaching them, and Benny doesn’t get a chance to interject or ask what the hell’s going on before they’re converging on Braxiatel with apparently singleminded determination.

“Professor Irving Braxiatel?” says a man in a suit well-tailored enough to rival Brax’s own – and, at his cautious nod, gains a grimly satisfied sort of expression. “You’re under arrest.”

*

\- _you brought this upon yourself, Braxiatel._

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> some notes, while I'm here:
> 
> \- Thank you all for being so patient with my horrendous update schedule. I can't guarantee anything from here on out, but hopefully I'll have this story finished with a 'complete' stamp inked on it by the end of this year. Hopefully. I hope I haven't jinxed myself.  
> \- Since it's been so long, you get some bonus content! If you want.  
> \- Here's the [sepelio Spotify playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4n1CjtDil0hZgHqgStNbH0) (e.g. the cannibalism-related jams i listen when i'm psyching myself up to write that may or may not have any bearing on the actual plot)  
> \- and here's a bunch of [fun character profiles](https://therogueofblood.tumblr.com/post/641290149748146176/having-trouble-keeping-up-with-all-the-major).  
> \- and as always, everyone's artwork and theories and memes are _delightful_ and they 1000% keep me going on especially bad days. [Here's the tag for them on my blog.](https://therogueofblood.tumblr.com/tagged/sepelio) Y'all are great.


End file.
